The Best (and Worst) Perfumes of 2025, Reviewed
- Audrey Robinovitz
- 41 minutes ago
- 24 min read
From Comme des Garçons to Hollywood Gifts, and everything in between.
It is one of the more uniquely human impulses to catalog. One of my favorite books of theory, Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, defines a new type of media consumption predicated on Otaku, or obsessive fans of various types of new millennium Japanese media. Azuma’s view of Otaku is highly critical, describing this new mode of consumption as inherently “animalistic” — trading the primacy of authored works for mere categorization of derivative types. The modern mode of consumption, therein, is never able to consider anything on its own, and is in a constant compulsive state of referential comparison, holding the self-authored work on par with countless fanmade derivatives: a wholly postmodern and degenerative way of turning reading or watching or listening into the automatic construction of Relational Databases. Other scholars, both in and outside Japan, following Azuma’s theories, have grown to soften their attitudes towards this type of consumption. Like it or not, however, I think in 2025, nearly 25 years after Azuma wrote about the fandoms behind media like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cardcaptor Sakura, Japanese media has taken over the world, and in a broader sense, people have become Otaku, or hyper-obsessive fans about so much more than just Idols and anime.
I am an Otaku for lots of things, some more embarrassing and traditional than others, but if nothing else, I am not as much of a perfume collector or ideally a perfume critic as I am a perfume Otaku. I would still buy it in secret if it stopped being cool, and my love for perfume has overshadowed and defined a number of IRL relationships with friends, family, and lovers. It’s been more of a problem in the past, but my urge to catalog is still as sharp as ever. That’s why, during my favorite time of year, I still find time to break away from Lessons and Carols church services and eating English toffee to rank my favorite and least favorite perfume releases of the last year. Like last year, the obvious niche perfume boom has given me a lot to celebrate.
I won’t waste any more time. Ladies and either gay gentlemen or a few uncharacteristically idiosyncratic heterosexual gentlemen probably on the spectrum, these are my favorite perfume releases of 2025.
The Year’s Biggest Triumphs
Clue Perfumery, Dandelion Butter
This was a clear standout, and really a release that defined a good portion of my personal year in terms of just how often I wore it. Like a few other fragrances here, I wrote an entire review and a broader interview with the team behind Clue Perfumery about this scent, so please refer to that for my more elaborate thoughts on it. Suffice to say, here, that as nearly half a year has gone by since its summertime release, I still feel this perfume is one of the most inventive and delightful things I’ve smelled in a long time. I think the broader category of what I could call “weird gourmands” — rice, milk, nuts, etc. — is incredibly in vogue. Dandelion Butter feels wholly divorced from the trend cycle and moreso connected to a nostalgic, gritty sense of childhood play. Its inspiration, a nonsensical childhood game involving real dandelion stems, taps into a sort of underground information economy of old wives' tales and 20th-century children’s games, and thus feels decisively before the internet age — in which kids were forced into authoring their own kinds of fun instead of defaulting to the adult developers of Roblox or Fortnite. The smell itself reflects the same warped childhood perspective that inspired my favorite Clue scent, With the Candlestick. Refrigerated, high-salt butter in slab form, grassy pollen stems, and dainty yellow blooms abound, and the drydown yields to a sweet sap that recalls tonguing honeysuckle in the outer bounds of the park your elementary school went for recess. A true pleasure to wear, and something absolutely worthy of cult status in the niche fragrance community. Get your hands and nose on it whenever it’s in stock.
Serviette, Byronic Hero
Another fragrance I’ve written about, and that’s also received press writeups from people far more influential than me. To suffice, this is the peak of Trey Taylor’s unique perfume style: accessible, rounded edges, marketable eccentricity, and deeper-than-it-seems class-conscious mingling of the profane with the sacred. The defining feature here is a pretty realistic diesel exhaust note, capturing that addictive gas-station smell and mixing it with a saffron-rose-oud combo that evokes some of the more popular designer niche oud fragrances. It’s not wholly dirty and has the same sort of alt-sheen as something like Black Saffron (a sweet leather styrax take on saffron I count as one of Byredo’s best). Wear Byronic Hero to the club, and let its distinct and unflinching sillage start conversations as easily as it frightens asthmatics.
Marlou, Heliodose
I do think Doliphor, the second fragrance release this year from enigmatic provocateurs Marlou, is the more unique and lauded of the two, but somehow Heliodose ended up being my secret favorite. The second collaboration with perfumer Stéphanie Bakouche, this attempts to translate the characteristic ferality (and fecality) of Marlou’s DNA into a floral fragrance. Needless to say, this is not at all what I was expecting. I imagined an animalic floral in the vein of their classy and very lovely Poudrextase, or even Eris Parfums’ stinky, sultry Night Flower. Heliodose, in contrast, focuses on the oft-maligned hedione molecule and elevates it to a hyper-sweet tropical zenith. Maybe the most accessible Marlou, this evokes the almond-tiare summertime sheen of Serge Lutens’ La Dompteuse Encagee. I get milky, fleshy, obscene white florals that shine with an almost plastic-toy perfection. It’s pretty simple, but laden with pissy indoles. Not even to the extreme that my beloved Olene turns heads — this indole heart resounds with a shallow femininity. If all the other Marlou perfumes smelled like 85-year-old women and were virally worn by beautiful 20-something girls, this actually smells like a 20-something girl, but probably won’t be worn by them. Sensual, but in an entirely new way for Marlou. If these are the fruits of expanding the palate of a very tightly controlled fragrance series, count me in.
Bogue, Come
I hadn’t tried any of the infamous Bogue fragrances before this, but Antonio Gardoni’s radical animalic work has come highly recommended. In a similar vein to Marlou, he is known for hyper-stinky perfumers’ perfumes, and this time has made something comparatively quite sweet. Suggestively titled, this is a sticky tropical floral enshrined in honeyed civet and medicinal helichrysum. The civet here is instantly recognizable, dated and regal in the same vein as Michael Jackson’s signature Bal A Versailles. What distinguishes it is a thick, sweet honey note that warms the nose in harmony with the helichrysum, and renders the animalics here much more approachable to the uninduced masses. Undertones include vanilla, ylang ylang, and grassy immortelle. Staggeringly layered, this unfolds over many hours on skin, revealing green nuances of wild patchouli, tea, and musk. Wear Come to a free love commune in rural Virginia in the 1960s and find new and inventive ways to have awful unprotected sex on psychedelics.
DI SER, Zuko
DI SER is perhaps the peak of modern Japanese perfumery in terms of the sheer quality of its releases, but often sticks faithfully to a citrus-forward palate, occasionally dipping its toes into dark oud with success. Zuko marks a departure into the world of incense and presents the accord in a novel manner wholly divorced from Western culture. This is the farthest thing in the world from Incense Avignon or any other requisite churchy smell, and highlights the ultra-camphoric smell of Zuko, a fine incense powder used by monks that also served as the inspiration for my all-time favorite discontinued Diptyque fragrance, Kimonanthe. DI SER’s take is equally medicinal as Kimonathe, but offers up a more faithful rendering of apothecary ingredients like turmeric, cinnamon leaf, and clove. What comes through most prominently, however, is eucalyptus-borne camphor. Like a hefty scoop of Tiger Balm, this wears less like a perfume and more like a remedy. As a professed fan of perfumes people often tout as unbearably medicinal, I was hooked. There is no ash here, but rather a grated spice that purifies the mind and body. Bring this with you to practice aikido, and rub it on your pulse points whenever you start to feel a cold coming on.
Zoologist Perfumes, Olm
This is a curious artifact. Composed by Spyros Drosopoulos, the Greek surgeon turned perfumer behind Baruti Perfumes, this slippery little fragrance is a far cry from the bold gourmand powerhouses that built up his original brand. As much as the packaging can sometimes be a little Reddit, I like the Zoologist series because it often involves commissioning perfumers with their own brands or established practices to make something a bit more weird and animalic. This takes a slightly different avenue with a similar spirit, being much more of an earthy-vegetal fragrance in the vein of Early Modern’s Celadon, a cult hit for the Scottish perfume house. I get a distinct umami impression of algae, but also a very damp, watery sediment-clay accord, like the highly underrated fragrance Lake Bottom from Folie a Plusieurs. The website itself lists a '“Water Cave Accord,” which I think does a good job of summing it up. There is a bit more traditional ISO E Super base that gives it some oomph, and does a good job of adding to the slightly unsettling alien sheen created by wearing this fragrance on skin. I don’t get the other stated notes of amber and sandalwood, but describing the base as “oily musks” is a delightful little turn of phrase that I think is followed up into the drydown of this fragrance’s wear. I would wear Olm from Zoologist Perfumes to hibernate in my bed for a few days at least, emerging slowly but surely from my covers like a wriggly prehistoric creature climbing onto dry land.
Agar Olfactory, Cereale
Speaking of prehistoric and weird creatures, this release from Chicago-based Agar Olfactory was launched right at the end of 2024, but had such a meaningful impact on my scent rotation this year that I feel it is wholly worth including. agustine zegers (styled in lowercase) has had a big year this year, to say the least. What went from a very precious Chicago insider’s secret has blown up on the weird girl niche fragrance Internet scene. I now see screenshots of their provocative notes lists on random corners of the internet, and find them stocked at a number of premier scent retailers in NYC, North Carolina, and beyond. Moreover, zegers has publicized a parent venture to Agar Olfactory, dubbed the speculative scent lab. Very much made in the collaborative, artistic vein as Agar, this project eschews optimizing retail profitability in favor of hosting a number of fascinating workshops at the intersection of ecology and olfaction, and custom smellscaping in the service of collaborating with artists on scented installation work. In a sales environment where an ounce of virality often triggers an outpouring of big-business capital, it’s truly meaningful to see zegers double down on the countercultural spirit that made Agar Olfactory stand out.
Their most recent release, Cereale, does just that. Inspired, as all their fragrances are, by a potential iteration of ecological apocalypse, the imaginative copy describes rye and bran monocultures threatened by a novel infection. This perfume, they write, is what food scientists develop to appease the taste for bread still prominent in popular culture. One of the most viscerally shocking fragrances I’ve smelled in recent memory, this is nothing like the delicate rose-water sourdough found in similar Chicago-based bread perfume purveyors. This smells, to me, exactly like a bowl full of warm water and active dry yeast. It isn’t even a baked bread perfume; it is a baking perfume itself. I get creamy lactone butter notes, atop a walloping from fermented yeasty dough. What adds to this perfume’s unique aggression is its insane strength. A few sprays instantly turn any room into the back of house at a Panera Bread, and on clothes, it lasts so long I smell it on them after running them through the laundry. Somewhat of an impish little sister to Selperniku, which is another oddball butter scent with an uncharacteristically powerful performance, wear Cereale to terrorize stay-at-home moms on the subway, or to carboload at 6 AM before running a half-marathon.
Jorum Studio, Vernus
I really didn’t hear much chatter about this perfume online, which is a shame. Released as a limited springtime exclusive for Scottish genius Euan McCall’s Jorum Studios, this is the polar opposite of a fresh, dewy tulip scent. Rough, dirty, and edgy, this is primarily a narcissus scent, which is among the more challenging floral notes in perfume. It used to be one I regarded with a bit of fear. At its worst, it is incredibly screechy and hay-like. Thanks to a wonderful ultra-dusty floral-loving close friend of mine, however, I’ve given narcissus a new lease on life. Vernus is undoubtedly a narcissus and daffodil soliflore with incredible dimension, getting to the essence of two very adorable but unexpectedly musty floral notes. Like lazily digging your fingers into dirt, it opens very tart and faintly sour. A visceral bright yellow and brown, you smell the entire flower from root to stem to bloom. I swear there’s almost a charred meat dimension to this floral perfume, it’s that fleshy. An extremely high dose of Jonquil absolute is what really defines Vernus’ profile. A subtle peppery-honey mixture, it speaks to the sweet arrival of spring with uncharacteristically warm tones. Wear this fragrance in April, or whenever you want to remember that one unfortunate time you got so happy about the end of the cold season you skipped through a flower field so fast you fell flat on your face.
January Scent Project, Sorabji
I was excited about a new release from Providence auteur John Biebel for a very long time. He’s been in a long process of rehauling his bottle and storefront designs, and I’ve certainly missed smelling things through his hyper-unique point of view. There isn’t a single JSP scent I don’t find technically interesting, but his newest, Sorabji, is uniquely approachable compared to some of the more heady concepts like the sharp herbal lilac/tumeric/apple experiment Vaporocindro. Inspired by the works of English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, this fragrance softly hums with warmth and spice, wearing like an amber perfume tinged with those candy lollipops spiked with scorpions. Based around the interplay between osmanthus, black tea, and apricot, I was perhaps projecting my experience of more Asiatic-oriented osmanthus-apricot fragrances like Kimonanthe onto my expectations for this release. The resulting smell, however, is closer to the warm library suede of Kafka on the Shore. Bolstered with a red Morocco book leather accord, my nose picks up chili pepper, tickling cooking spices like tarragon, and a hearty dose of osmanthus. Where there is apricot, it moreso adds a hazy sweetness, wearing into the drydown like a vanilla-amber on my skin. I truly feel this is a great scent to gift someone to introduce them to the world of experimental perfume, as it’s made from exclusively strange ingredients you won’t find on designer shelves, yet it has an addictive, sweet tinge that makes it a beguiling and wearable signature. Buy this for the person in your friend group who loves an NPR subscription and a good cup of spicy instant ramen, and watch the compliments from its extrait-level sillage roll in.
Commes des Garçons, Max Richter 01
You’ll learn this later, but beloved alt-fashion house Comme des Garçons’ fragrance release schedule has been very hit-or-miss this year. Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting to like this one, but it’s a hit. Another experimental musician collab, this fragrance draws from smells familiar to a musician’s studio: graphite, piano wood, magnetic tape. What I smell is somewhere in between the mellow coffee musk of Odeur Du Theatre Du Chatelet Acte 1 and the more marketable varnish-accord skin scent Zero. In a sense, it does something both of these fragrances try to do in their own ways: evoke the intimacy and atmosphere of artists at work, including the more unseemly smells of their materials. Max Richter 01 does this with a very realistic metallic pencil lead smell, mixed with a sleek black pepper wood base that feels marketable to Rick Owens bros who are willing to drop money blindly on something like this. I don’t get a ton of other notes, here, but the art-class-wood effect feels approachable and not horribly indebted to the current trend cycle, so I think it works. There’s enough here to differentiate it from other releases from the house, and if anything, I think it does a better job fitting into the Odeur series, of which its bottle seems reminiscent.
Hollywood Gifts, Centerfold
The debut from Nose Candy podcasteuse Maddie Phinney, I’ve previously written a lot on my blog about this perfume. Needless to say, I think it's really good at doing the kitschy poptimist gourmand thing lots of more established perfumers (see the final entry on this write-up) are trying to do right now. Centerfold, a photorealistic Cherry ChapStick accord meets amaretto and boxed chocolates, wearing on skin for an entire day and evoking memories of cool older girls in high school who smoked stolen cigs behind their parents’ backs and had trashed cars full of tabloids.
Frankly, Woah
This is a hard one to find, but really fun. Born from design studio I Know You Know, Whoa’s bottle is an art object in and of itself. Inspired by the delirious tones of California in the summertime, this is a pineapple fragrance with a unique nail polish accord. It’s not necessarily the front-and-center of the composition, which is very wearable. I think of this as a sticky, juicy grapefruit-tropical hybrid, with an acetone artificial base that wears similarly to a mainstream CDG fragrance. Of all the fragrances on this list, I do think I’ve worn this one the least, but it has its time and place from June through August. Extra points should be awarded for having a gorgeously designed bottle, though I get the sense from the other fragrances in this line that the aesthetics of their release may have even been too prominent a concern. As far as design studio perfumes go, though, this one will do just fine.
Sylhouette Parfums, L’Etoile Mourante
Of everything I’ve put in this list, I was most wowed by this weird little perfume from Vietnam-based provocateurs Sylhouette. I haven’t smelled as much as I’d like from them, but it’s safe to say pretty much everything I’ve encountered has been cutting-edge and hyper-experimental. Explicitly dedicated to the victims of the Genocide in Gaza, Molotov Cocktail was a truly breathtaking metallic fragrance, with accents of blood, burned leather, sweat, pepper spray, and vodka that would make fragrance bros who hype up the utterly mediocre Inexcusable Evil turn up their patchy pubescent mustachioed noses. L’Etoile Mourante is something entirely different, a quiet, aching fairy that wiggles quietly into the grey matter in your brain. I see loose comparisons only to two very hard-to-find gems: Serge Lutens’ Bas de Soie, a fleshy hyacinth in the noble tradition of No 19, and the ultimate discontinued unicorn from Byredo, Seven Veils. Like Seven Veils, L’Etoile turns the spotlight on carrot seed: a suede-like, vegetal, peppery smell that cuts deeply into the nostalgia glands, evoking simmering stews and old world glimmer. Fantasy accords like “star dust” and “cosmic smoke” read to me as sultry orris and black pepper. The principal floral accord here is Blue Wisteria, a highly delicate hanging floral with dewy green budding accents not unlike Jo Malone’s grandma’s favorite hand soap.
There’s something elegiac about this perfume; Palo Santo and smoky incense undertones lend a severity to the pretty floral-spice opening. There are no real similarities between the notes, but the quiet register in which this perfume speaks reminds me of my prized signature scent, Passage d’Enfer. Astoundingly delicate, this wears on skin with a subtlety that can truly be thrown off by something as commonplace as the ambient smell of a room. This perfume is best experienced outside, perhaps right after it’s rained the kind of long-awaited summer rain that turns cracked soil into feed for earthworms. Long, wriggly, and nothing other than that which they are, and an unapologetic and tiny natural beauty the entire food chain has grown to depend on.
Pearfat Parfum, Sister Hildegard
This one also surprised me, because Alie Kiral’s work for Pearfat is always extremely inventive, but it often features a quirky warmth and wearability. This perfume, on the other hand, seems quite difficult to wear, with an inherent strangeness that really caught me off guard but has endeared it to me all the more over time. The scent is inspired by one of my favorite saints, the polymath and abbess Sister Hildegard of Bingen, whose musical and theological work has managed to break free from the exclusive confines of Christian worship into the cultural mainstream. Celebrated as an esoteric feminist icon, her work transcends gender, class, and often even religious piety, speaking to the strange dignity of the soul and calling listeners into mystic realms of union with the divine.
Kiral’s tribute eschews the too-obvious choice of making a capital-C Church Incense Perfume, focusing rather on Bingen’s love for the Viriditas of the natural world. The first and most prominent note to me is cyclamen, a watery, crisp vegetal note I associate with an odd little gem from my benefactors at Diptyque called Eau de Lierre. It prevails into the drydown, wearing as if you’d romped through the small overgrown cemetery behind the cathedral walls. This is also a lactonic scent, however, and a prevalent tepid milk quality evokes The Nursing Madonna and the strange maternal visions of Saint Bernard partaking of the Virgin Mother’s breastmilk. Underlying accords submit themselves to the union of green and milky overtones, but I do detect a vague smokiness as well as the punch of juicy orange. A fantasy accord Kiral describes as “flecks of dust against stained glass,” I don’t entirely smell the full vision here, but there is something really strange and evocative about this perfume.
I honestly see another potential comparison to the very misunderstood Secretions Magnifiques from mainstream provocateurs Etat Libre d’Orange. It garnered viral fame for supposedly being unwearable, for smelling like blood and cum mixed together in a tribute to the most disgusting viscera of what makes people people. I don’t entirely think it lives up to this claim, however — and, to me, it wears on skin as an almost-tropical seaweed iris and milk fragrance. There’s a similar fleshy, salty quality here, though that would probably be enough to make someone not already entrenched in the world of weird perfume pretty put off. Luckily, this is a limited-edition scent from an indie retailer that exclusively appeals to weird girls looking to smell like memories or twee concepts, so it’s found a tidy little audience of freaks to nestle into. Wear this perfume to 12 PM Thursday Mass with only three or four people in the church, and wander aimlessly around the campus afterwards until you start to hear voices.
d’Annam, Spring Festival
There’s been a lot of hype this year about perfumes from Vietnam-based d’Annam, all inspired by different aspects of Asian culture and released in small series dedicated to specific countries. I do really enjoy their coffee scent, and I was partial to the more premium offering from their Japan line. That said, I do sometimes feel they miss the mark with some of their concepts, and not everything they release wowed me. That said, I was interested in the Chinese-themed collection released this year, and while I was only able to sample one option, I liked it a lot. Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, is the annual center of the Chinese celebratory calendar. The fragrance created to commemorate this occasion is quite unique and evocative, centered around a Candied Hawthorne note inspired by Tanghulu, a skewer of fresh fruit covered in sugar often served at New Year’s festivals. Citrus notes of mandarin take a backseat to a smoky, medicinal sugar and plum blossom mixture that maybe doesn’t feel uniquely Chinese, but certainly evokes various East Asian sundries and tonics at large. The drydown is powdery and sweet, perhaps from the stated notes of Red Dates and “Red Lanterns” (Something paper-adjacent? What a bold fantasy note to include). I think of all the scents included, here, this is the least effective at living up to its very specific concept, but I will always love any fragrance that bolsters up medicinal, powdery, and fruity smells into a lovely salve. Wear this in Chinatown to smell like you know where to find the best Tang Yuan glutinous rice balls in town.
Neela Vermeire Creations, Eshal
This scent is truly gorgeous. Contributing a fresh take on the tuberose soliflore, an extremely crowded market already, this scent is defined by a bold injection of turmeric. Tepid, spiced, and herbal, the tuberose in Eshal is far from milky or opulent in a classical way. I see a similarity to Dominique Ropion’s “brutalist tuberose” scent for Regime des Fleurs. In an effort to distance himself from having created perhaps the most iconic niche tuberose perfume of all time, defined by its headiness and plush sensuality, Ropion has gone on to make fragrances that push tuberose in a dry, verdant, or spiced resin cast. To be honest, I’ve found this approach to have mixed results, but here, another master perfumer, Bertrand Duchaufour, seems to have taken this playbook and excelled with it. Another man, somewhat burdened by his most iconic scent compositions, this fragrance smells like the (honestly better) younger sister to his own private-label tuberose, Jodhpur 6AM. Zesty, exotic, and dry, this fragrance opens with a similar lime to Moonmilk. The center is indeed tuberose; however, it reads less like White Diamonds and more like green, waxy tubers and stems. Vibrant and fresh, this is a tuberose that eschews Eurocentric ideals of ballroom white florals and smells like Indian tuberose in its holistic environment.
Universal Flowering, Étude in Black
Courtney Rafuse has been moving pretty under the radar for the last year or so, releasing only collaborations with other creatives or businesses, all while navigating the various pitfalls of being a Canadian brand shipping frequently to the tariff-laden isolationist USA. Needless to say, it came as a welcome surprise to see two new bombshells saunter their way into the Universal Flowering core collection. Released quietly alongside a broader streamlining of her bottle and website design, Étude in Black and her brother Big Night certainly prove that Rafuse still has the touch.
Big Night is a bold pineapple mélange in the vein of the criminally underrated Music for a While, or DS&Durga’s clubbing fragrance Black Magenta. The centerpiece here is a gritty, sweet vetiver, not unlike the ingredient used in the ginger-forward Poems One Through Twelve. Where Poems leans sweet, Big Night is tart and sour. Like a man cozying up in Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville resort after calling over several hookers, this is sleazy, charming, and masculine in a weird, off-kilter dad way. That said, Étude in Black was my favorite of the two, and immediately garnered an impulse bottle buy on the basis of its sheer uniqueness. Rafuse always couples her scent creations with evocative associative poetry, and Étude is no exception. I found her description here so meaningful, I feel it’s worth repeating in its entirety below:
The roses arrived at noon. I don’t recall the impact, only the machinery of its reception. Chrome shears dulled by tap water, the too-tall vase, a note of brutalist prose. This is how it always starts. With a feeling, yes, but more so the things I decorate the feeling with in order to engage in the ceremony.
This is not just a story I tell myself. It’s simply an excavated surface I have to tend to. Pruning a bush with the focus of a surgeon, making the essential cuts that angle at growth. Hours arranging a room like a calculation of chance. This is not just a ritual!
So I left the roses in the vase. I didn’t trim the stems. I didn’t change the water. I watched them mainline their own filth to a familiar, clouded end. How perverse, witnessing a thing so alive delight in its own consummation. Is letting them just be the most violent instruction? The now black petals, dutifully dropping onto the polished wood, are the only appropriate response.
This is a rose perfume, I suppose — but one completely turned on its head. Rose is quite a hard note to convince me of, as I often feel rose perfumes rest too heavily upon their own laurels, so to speak, doing very little to expound upon the same few recipes for popular success invented in the 20th century or even the 21st. That said, this fragrance is clearly conceptually interested in the aesthetics of decay and of delirium, which I find it evokes quite handily. I barely get rose as a flower, here; it's listed in the notes as “rose liqueur,” and the opening of this perfume has all the sparkling boozy effervescence of a good Poinsettia or even a Rose Cocktail. Plasticine juicy strawberry adds a playful femme veneer, like Fraaagola Saalaaata’s older sister, who during the long winter of ‘77 was involuntarily committed to a mental institution.
Even beyond its booziness, this scent evokes soirees and juicy red fruits at wintertime gatherings. Into the drydown, however, two notable accords emerge. One is candle wax, a dramatic smoky-waxy sheen not unlike the accents of one of my own most worn scents of all time, With the Candlestick. Hinoki and rosewood combine into a nondescript industrial-woody veneer, like the sheen of a wooden bar counter or a well-worn antique chair with long, unkempt fingernail scratches along the sides. Candle smoke, incense, and powdery cocktail glitter turn this rose into a Plato’s Cave reflection of the flower. This is rose-flavored, not a floral or fruity scent. This evokes all the finer trappings of a princess dissatisfied with the insanity-inducing confines of her station. Wear Étude in Black to unnerve people at your office’s holiday party, or to whittle down the days while shut in your room on a 19th-century rest cure.
The Year’s Biggest Disappointments
As perfume giveth, perfume often taketh away. With the explosion of niche perfume comes the marketing of $200+ bottles of snake oil — Eaux de Parfums you quite literally do not need, bolstered by high-budget ad campaigns that try to convince you others will like you better for wearing them. Some of these perfumes were things I was really excited to smell, but was really let down by. I generally try to stay away from independent perfumers who are trying their best, but maybe just didn’t connect with my audience niche. Big box niche retailers, however, are always fair game. Let’s begin.
DS&Durga, Brown Flowers
I feel, based on its advertising campaign, this perfume was supposed to be Wes Anderson, Annie Hall drab-chic core as a smell. Leave it to the (often lovable) hipsters at DS&Durga to try to make a perfume that smells, ironically, boring on purpose. I wish it even did that, to be honest. David Moltz is usually pretty deft with floral notes, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of his past stabs at white floral perfumes, including some great ones they felt the need to discontinue. That said, Brown Flowers was basically just a dusty coffee-jasmine hybrid, and didn’t really feel vintage to me, much less something that speaks to current niche scent interests.
Maybe my biggest problem with this perfume is that it’s not brown, and not even grey. This is much more of an orange, springy white floral, which would maybe be better marketed as an April exclusive or as one of the elusive and often very unpredictable Studio Juices. I don’t even hate this scent; I was just so hyped by the marketing that I found the scent itself didn't really relate to its inspiration at all. Maybe throw in some powdery animalic base, make it actually reminiscent of the 1970s. Whatever, a shot and a miss is something Moltz is certainly capable of brushing off, and I’m still excited to keep up with their packed future release schedule under the auspices of my own generous employer, Manzanita Capital.
Commes des Garçons, Odeur 10
This one actually made me mad. The Odeur series represents some of the most experimental attempts at designer niche perfumery, and I consider scents like Odeur 53 masterpieces. This perfume is simply Byredo Blanche for people who think they’re too good for Byredo Blanche. Barely even off-putting, it’s a fresh laundry, modern aldehyde skin scent, not buttery, not spiced, just clean. I never thought I would see the day that Comme des Garçons caters to the clean girl market. Sad!
Francesca Bianchi, The Essence
This one is a bit of a weird artifact because I don’t think it was necessarily meant to stand on its own as a perfume. This was the great Italian perfumer Francesca Bianchi’s attempt at capturing the general base notes common to most of her existing fragrances, to wear as a sort of “enhancer” for other fragrances. I suppose she does a good job at capturing this, but to be honest, I don’t find The Essence terribly compelling. When Bianchi is at her best, it’s often what she can add to this basic violet-civet structure that makes her perfumes great. Maybe this was an attempt to compete with Molecule 01-type basic skin scents, and in that case, I don’t really think it works. Moreso, I think this bit is kind of played out in 2025, and I’d like to see Bianchi working to give her audience more, not less. In the wake of Glossier You terrorizing girls and gays across the world, I think perfume that distinctly smells like you are wearing perfume is the new vogue. If I wanted to seem like I wasn’t wearing perfume, I would just not wear perfume. Which, of course, I would never do.
Byredo, Alto Astral
These days, I’m mostly done being reflexively mean to the enfant terrible luxury niche perfumers at Byredo, only because, by my own suspicions, they’re likely on the brink of bankruptcy. That said, this new perfume is just objectively a bad attempt to capitalize on the success of their aldehydic laundry scent, Blanche. I was somewhat hopeful to see aldehydes on the menu again, because while I don’t think it’s terribly inventive, I do have to hand it to Blanche for making young women crave aldehydic scents again, and to break past their knee-jerk reaction to call anything aldehydic “old lady-like” because of its connections with Chanel No. 5 and the usual suspects.
It’s funny to me that “clean, fresh, laundry scents” are very in with the masses right now, but only if you market them without mentioning the very same ingredients that made classic perfumes of the 1920s-50s really pop. There’s a recursive beauty to knowing that women are deathly afraid of aging and, by extension, don’t want to smell like their grandmothers, but also have noses that respond to the same core ingredients their grandmothers did, making them more alike than either would probably assume. Needless to say, Alto Astral has none of the historic connotations of aldehydes, and instead sublimates the note to a suntan-lotion style vanilla coconut note that reminds me of sugary ambers like Baccarat Rouge and its countless imitators. It’s actually quite the opposite of a grandma scent; this perfume was designed to please a teenage girl and all those whose olfactory tastes haven’t evolved from that stage of life onward. If I wanted a tropical scent, I would get a tropical scent. If I wanted a clean soapy scent, I would get a clean soapy scent. This perfume tries to do both and ends up accomplishing neither.
Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Kurky
I honestly feel sorry, because I do think that Maison Francis Kurkdjian has made it onto my biggest disappointments list every single year I’ve made them. I don’t hate MFK, despite my indications, and the Grand Soir series is lovely. I’m so glad they brought back Absolu Pour le Soir, even if it is updated to modern guidelines. That said, this new release, Kurky, is literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen hit the Neiman Marcus shelves. Even when Frederic Malle did the whole playful childhood nostalgia thing, he did it with an ounce of class. This not only looks like a perfume for seven-year-olds, but it smells like one, too. I understand the whole getting in touch with your inner child thing, but my inner child isn’t spending $265 on a fruity musk fragrance that smells like off-brand children’s shampoo. I know Quest International Flavors and Fragrances wasn’t paying that much to commission brainless fruity gourmand scents back when you used to push perfumes for them. Please learn from this, Francis, for all our sakes. 🌀
This piece was concurrently published in Robinovitz's perfume newsletter, Eat Your Lipstick.
Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.