A thing I often do at this time of year, when it’s grey and miserable outside and everyone’s still broke, is get really into perfume.
Not the full bottles. No, have you seen the prices? I’m not buying full bottles of anything these days — not wine, not olive oil, and not hand wash (not since I found out that nice hand wash is, per ml, more expensive than champagne). In this economy, I basically just scavenge for dribbles of whatever liquids I can find.
And so it is with perfume. When spring is taking its time arriving, I get this hankering to see and feel new things. Trying miniature samples of new perfumes is my favourite way to do this.
This is how I start: I decide on a specific scent, or general family of scents, that I’m craving. Last year, it was subtle “your skin but better” scents: things that smell like a nice bath, freshly folded laundry, clean sheets. This year, I’m after something more edible and delectable: stuff that smells like vanilla, raisin, citrus, coconut, almond, pistachio. They call these “gourmand” scents. Previously, these types of perfumes always felt a bit heavy and sweet for me, but now they’re all I’m after.
OK, so we’re looking for gourmand. TikTok is full of people who love this kind of thing, so I’ll have a search around for “best gourmand scents” on there or whatever. Then I pick a couple that sound interesting, plug them into Fragrantica, and explore the recommended options from there.
THEN, once I’ve built up a shortlist of perfumes I want to try, I go to one of the online shops that sells 1ml or 2ml samples in tiny bottles. Small Aromas is the one I used this time. And I’ll choose maybe five or six different perfumes to sample, and they arrive in the post, and I wear a different one each day for a week, and feel extremely fancy.
On my gourmand odyssey of discovery this week, the perfume I’ve been least impressed by is Kayali’s Yum Pistachio Gelato. On me, this just smelled like one of the So…? body sprays I used to wear to school discos in 2001. Nothing too wrong with that, except that it’s very of its time, and the same effect can be had down at Superdrug any day of the week.
My biggest hit this time around was a surprise: Panettone by Milano Fragranze. The idea of a perfume that was supposed to smell exactly like a panettone made me laugh, especially as panettone is a Christmas food and it is now very much late February.
But my god! It smells so delicious. Yes, it smells exactly like a warm panettone, fresh out of the oven. But it also, on me, smells like orange zest, and a really tasty glass of something, and a kitchen full of friends who’ve just come round to dinner in a good mood. I wore it to see my hairdresser, Chantelle, today. ‘Oh my god,’ said Chantelle, who knows what she’s talking about. ‘You smell amazing. What perfume is that?’
So alas now I probably do have to order a whole bottle. Because the secret to smelling good, it turns out, is to smell like a cake.
Other lush things this week…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Lush Gloom to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.