How to find the best name for your perfume

From PGLightyears.com

    The best name for your perfume will come out of your own imagination but it might not come out as quickly as you would like. Give your imagination some inputs. Let them settle a bit and then begin to play -- PLAY -- with names, not trying to hit on THE NAME but just playing to see what names you might come up with. When you've played, and played, and played you'll suddenly realize you're looking at more than one good name. Now you've got to decide which of these good names best represents your perfume and the story you have envisioned for it.

    Give it time. More than just overnight. But in a few days you'll find that one name stands out over the others. THAT will be your best name.

    But let's look at how you can give your brain some input that will help suggest names. The wider the variety of input, the more good "name ideas" you'll produce. Here are a few tricks I've used --
   
Scrabble tiles

    I have a box of Scrabble tiles on my desk. I'll throw them down at random and then start to look at letters that seem to be drawn to each other that make names or partial names. The spelling doesn't matter. It's the sound that's important. The more you play with the tiles, the more names will suggest themselves to you. I've written about this before.

830 perfume names

    More recently I've been playing with a list of 830 perfume names that was generated by computer software. Many of the names in this list are stupid. Many are a bit nasty. Some are nice. Some might be unusable for other reasons but the game I've played is not to use the names but to let these names suggest names, to let them be a starting point to spark my imagination. It's been working for me and I'm guessing that it will work for you.

Other sources of inspiration

    Go through the pages of a dictionary. You might find good names, good parts of names, and inspirations for names. Go through magazines and look for words that sound nice to you and inspire visual images for you. Go through books, novels in particular, and see if some words don't jump out at you and inspire you with variations of these words.

In short ...

    You know your perfume. You know what sounds, words patterns and ideas might work for it. Make lists of lots of names, for a game, without much thought. Then start to match up the names on your list with the images you have of your perfume. You're going to find the best name possible for your fragrance!