Your Perfume Wardrobe

Who wants to smell the same all the time?

By Claire

For a very long time I subscribed to the idea of a signature scent. You find a perfume you love and then remain faithful to it forever more, wafting about your unmistakeable stink to everyone you know until you are spritzed in your coffin and sent into the ground. A lovely, romantic idea – but the challenge is finding a perfume that feels perfectly you, isn’t it? Like capsule wardrobes, three word personal style or figuring out your Kibbe type, you can really go on a long term navel gaze here. I think it all might be a waste of time.

Look, it might have been easy when there were say, 30 perfumes to choose from in total, and they were all called elegant things like Shalimar, or L’Air du Temps or whatever. Now there are thousands and thousands. You really want to commit to one for your whole life? Plus, what if you like the smell but not the name or the marketing? I mean, what if your signature scent turns out to be BOSS Orange or CKin2U? No! It won’t do! Find something else to research and give yourself permission to have a few perfumes you like – I don’t feel the same every day, so I don’t want to smell the same either. Here is the perfume wardrobe I think we all need, with suggestions. (This is of course entirely subjective, but remember I do have great taste babe).

Failsafe daytime scent

I think this is as close to a signature scent as you’re going to get from me. I’m imagining a day-to-day scent, probably for colder weather, that you just reach for automatically in the morning. It smells comforting, musky, maybe a little powdery? It’s not making any statement other than ‘I smell very nice but unobtrusive’. I think the term for this now is a ‘skinscent’ but that has Silence of the Lambs connotations to me so I’m not using it.

You by Glossier is just the sort of thing I mean. It’s musky and sort of melts into your skin. She’s soapy and well groomed without being too fresh – some pencil shavings are in the background to mitigate this.

I also love Rive Gauche by Yves Saint Laurent. This is full on when you spray it at first, but has one of the nicest, almost savoury drydowns I know of. Works particularly well on clothes/a scarf as a result. Powdery, Chypre, quietly sexy. Be warned though that this is a very 80s smell, so some people associate it very firmly with big shoulder pads etc.

I also want to mention Santal 33 by Le Labo – This is kind of woody and aqueous at the same time, and has some cardamom in it, which keeps it from feeling too bland. By far the worst thing about Santal is how much of it is about – you regularly get whiffs of it on the tube. If you don’t think you’ve smelt it before, I’ll bet you recognise it when you do. Malin and Goetz do one called Leather which is in the same vein but less ubiquitous (and cheaper).