Retailers use quiz to help customers choose the right scent

Washington

ENTER the beauty floor of a department store at your own peril. The unprepared must run a gantlet between cosmetics kiosks and bubbly makeup artists in a valiant effort to avoid the most dreaded of creatures: the perfume spritzers.

Armed with bottles of the latest fragrance, they stand smiling and ready to douse passers-by, hoping a sudden olfactory epiphany will strike. What are the chances, really? Turns out, pushy spritzers may not be the most effective way to get shoppers to buy fragrances, so retailers are taking a new tack.

Sephora is testing a method developed by a San Francisco-based fragrance startup called Pinrose that brings technology and psychology to your nose. Founded in 2013 as an online perfume seller by Erika Shumate and Christine Luby, Pinrose stood out because of a quiz that attempted to figure out a shopper's personality, using t…