The reason so many luxury moisturizers have a strong perfume scent is simple: they put perfume in the cream.

One reason they do it is to cover the smell of petroleum-based ingredients, or other ingredients that don't smell great on their own. A cream made from clean ingredients has nothing to cover up.

Here is the quick test. Turn the jar over. If "fragrance" or "parfum" sits in the first half of the list, ask what it's there for. One word on a label can stand for dozens of compounds, and the label doesn't have to tell you which. The second thing to look for is where the actives sit. If the peptides and vitamins you're paying for come after the fragrance in the list, the jar is mostly base, and the smell is doing the work the ingredients were supposed to do.

Why fragrance gets added at all comes down to two reasons, and only one of them is about you.

The first is cover. Some ingredients don't smell like much, and some smell like what they are: petroleum-derived bases, certain emulsifiers, some plant extracts. A perfume on top makes the whole thing smell finished. The second reason is the counter. A cream that smells expensive sells better in the first ten seconds than one that smells like nothing, and the first ten seconds are when most creams get bought.

What the label doesn't tell you is what the word means. "Fragrance" or "parfum" is a single line that can stand for dozens of individual compounds, and the rules let it stay a single line. So one word on the jar is the one word you can't look up.

Here is the full test, then. Turn the jar over. First, find fragrance or parfum and see where it sits. In the first half of the list means there's a lot of it. Second, find the actives, the ingredients with names you'd have to search, and see whether they sit above or below the fragrance line. Above is a formula. Below is a scented base with a story.

There's a practical reason to prefer no perfume beyond the label reading. A cream with nothing in it to cover up has one fewer thing to argue with your skin, and the fewer things a formula asks your skin to tolerate, the more of it you tend to use, which is the part that actually changes how skin looks.

Ours smell like what they're made of. Citrus Stem Cell Miracle smells like the Caribbean orange oil that's in it, and that's the only scent in the bottle. Day & Night Ageless and Deep Moisturizer have no perfume added at all. Every ingredient in each one is named on the jar and on our science page, with the lab it comes from, which is only possible when there's nothing on the list you'd rather people didn't read.

-Jackie