Puritans, bubblegum, and the decline of an empire: perfumes in 2025 so far

Newsletter #18: a mid year vibe check

How on earth is it June?

Here in Australia it feels like I blinked and we jumped from Easter right in to winter. We have had weeks of endless grey and flooding rain, which has gotten old even for someone like me who self identifies with the Addams Family rainy day sketch. It’s grim indeed if even I am welcoming a glimpse of the sun.

The relentless pace of perfume releases and content has only increased in 2025. New releases, controversies, rebrands and new brands and borrowed brands and blue brands - it’s hard to keep track of what is notable and what is noise. It’s times like these that I am grateful that my distance from a lot of the fragrance world means I’m forced to take things at a slower pace. If I lived in New York or London, I would be a menace.

At the start of the year I mentioned some new and new-to me perfumes I had on the sniff list. Six months in and that list is looking radically different, so I thought I’d talk about some new things I’ve smelled and haven’t written about since the beginning of the year. Let’s do some blitz Quick Sniffs.

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You Fleur (Glossier)

There’s a lot of bizarre happenings going on over at Glossier. The bellwether millennial makeup and skincare brand wisely understood that building a perfume empire around their original runaway success You (2017) could save the company from a potential crash and burn. It’s a truth commonly acknowledged that perfume lines keep fashion and beauty brands in the black: sell enough bottles and you’ll have the space to waste capital on new product launches the whole year round.

And Glossier had a lot to build on, because they took their time with You. Ignore all the marketing nonsense about how it’s a perfume that binds to your unique aroma and casts a magic spell: it’s a clever, enormous pear-iris-ambrette laundry cleaner floral.

You is one of the fragrances, like L’eau D’Issey and CKOne, that is marketed as a ‘skin scent’ and is meant to smell soft with a low sillage when it really has all the subtlety of a jackhammer and will immediately fill a room as soon as it’s sprayed. You was the perfect scent for Glossier because it embodies the clean-girl beauty that the brand sells and is tame enough for mass market popularity.

Depressingly the brand has not sought the interpret its aesthetic in new olfactory ways. Instead it seems happy to chug out more flankers of You, perhaps in the hopes that You will eventually become exhausted of Yourself and go back to try and find another, better You.

Even with this limited scope, there’s plenty of room to innovate within the simple pink pepper-iris-musk structure of You. And though Yous Reve and Doux disappointed me (being, respectively, a scrubber almond nightmare and a bad imitation of Santal 33), I was cautiously keen to smell You Fleur. This was mainly because the perfume lists an osmanthus note, and osmanthus is one of my favourite florals in the perfumer’s palette. Osmanthus is leathery, apricot-y, a bit clinical, a bit severe, and heart stoppingly gorgeous when it’s done well.

All of the news coverage for You Fleur - and there was a lot - kept calling it an ‘anti-floral floral’ and ‘a floral scent for girls who hate florals’, which I can only assume were lines that the brand handed out to its sponsored content creators because it has the distinct flavour of marketing bullshit, doubly so because the original You was also a floral.

But when I sprayed it I understood what they getting at, because the scent really isn’t very floral at all. Instead it’s a musk, a cloying and overwhelming musk that attempts to use it apricot/osmanthus accord to give the perfume a suede-like texture. I understand the concept but knew immediately upon smelling that they’d missed the mark. This is double as odd because there’s been a ton of great suede perfumes in the past decade, not least Nomade (2018), which gives the neo-chypre non-floral floral I think Fleur was aiming for.

Texture perfumes are a hard sell because you’re banking on the sniffer understanding the vibe you’re aiming for and also having a positive association with that feeling. I suppose to Fleur’s credit there is a feeling of fruit skin about it, like the velvety texture of an apricot in season, but paired with the enormous clinical musk it all just feels a bit weird. Glossier is a very American brand in that it does not want a lick of sensuality about its perfumes. Its flowers are powdery; its musks are hygienic; everything about perfume at Glossier says clean, pure, hydrated, white socks and slickbacks, Goody Proctor at Pilates.

You can see how the presence of a sensual apricot-suede note doesn’t really work with the aesthetic. Glossier scents are meant to be skin scents, not scents that evoke the skin. God forbid there be a person in the perfume; god forbid that person wants to be touched; god forbid you smell anything other than clean.

Mostly You Fleur annoyed me by butchering what could have been a perfectly lovely osmanthus note. But I suppose it fills the flanker brief of a lighter, springtime version of the original You. I understand the appeal of flankers to a brand - they’re relatively cheap and fast to develop, and they have an inbuilt audience and marketing that has paid for itself. But if Glossier truly wants to survive on its perfume empire, it needs to start thinking about something other than You.

Embrace a bit of filth, please. Your brand will be all the better for it. ★★☆☆☆

Rose Exposed (Tom Ford)

Is there anyone in 2025 who doesn’t feel like the Tom Ford schtick has run a little thin? If so, please stand up and make yourself known: I have so many questions to ask you.

For the rest of us it’s down to the designer counter to smell the latest overpriced little square plinth of cheekily named chemical fug.

My problem with Tom Ford is not the house style or the silly names or even the expensive juice - it’s that instead of taking their time to make one really great perfume they always seem to err towards making three kind of boring ones instead.

Maybe that would be easier to accept if Tom Ford wasn’t one of the great perfume houses of the 21st century, who also have a frustrating habit of discontinuing some of their best scents. (I would trade in their last ten releases for a single perfect bottle of Plum Japonais or Sahara Noir).

But the ghosts of former brilliance, and the genuine love I have for the Tom Ford scents in my collection, draw me back to smell their new releases in the hope that there’s life in the brand yet. That’s how we come to Rose Exposed, the latest in what feels like about a hundred rose Tom Ford scents. The damascenone Tom Ford lover can now choose between Rose Exposed, Rose de Chine, Rose de Russie, Rose d’Amalfi, Cafe Rose, Rose Prick, Noir de Noir, and on and on.

Is this new rose unique enough to join the already bloated line up? Not really, but you can tell as soon as you smell it that the poor creature is trying its hardest to justify its existence. Rose Exposed is a bitter leather rose which immediately takes the sniffer into the world of Arabic style rose masculines. There’s something Rose and Cuir about this, something a little Amouage Rose Incense, though if those perfumes are symphonies this is more of a sinfonietta.

The new era of Tom Ford perfumes have an unfortunate flash-and-fade structure very common in designer perfume. The trick is to load all of the interest in first five minutes so that the sniffer will think it’s a winner, buy the thing, and then only realise once they’re home that the drydown is a bit of a dud. Whilst not a sound investment it does give a great snapshot of the entire scent very quickly, which is helpful if you’re sniffing a lot of things all at once.

And the first five minutes of Rose Exposed are indeed interesting: there’s a weird new-car leather bouncing off a sharp bitter greenness and pink pepper, the moustache twirling villain of modern top notes. And of course there is rose, here almost a translucent rosewater that doubles down on the loukhoum Middle Eastern feel of the scent.

The modern designer top structure is almost a mini perfume all on its own, like a butterfly that only lives for a half an hour on your skin before she disappears and you miss her, even more when you’ve got to deal with the carcass that’s left in her wake.

There’s something pleasantly fusty about Rose Exposed, even in its rather thin drydown. Tom Ford can sometimes lean a little too hard into the slinky satin-gown-and-cigars world of perfumery without pulling off the execution. I always expect something performatively sexy in a Tom Ford perfume, which is different from actually being sexy, but this perfume is neither. Honestly it’s more of a dusty attic kind of rose, too synthetic to be vintage but aiming to evoke that old Hollywood world, with all its glamour and sub rosa violence.

Rose Exposed is probably an unnecessary perfume. But it made me smile because it is not quite so focus-group smelling; it has a glimmer of that original, brilliant era of Tom Ford. It smells like the time when niche was starting to eat away at the market but there was still a designer brand daring enough to give us perfumes like Black Orchid and Tuscan Leather and Amber Absolute (god, remember Amber Absolute?). What I mean to say is, Rose Exposed has character.

That’s what I love best about Tom Ford perfumes when they’re really great: they are bombastic and crass and good natured and fun in the way that masstige perfumes were in the 20th century. Enough roses, Tom Ford. Take your time and give us something huge and silly and really, really fucking fabulous. ★★★☆☆

Kurky (Maison Francis Kurkdjian)

A chewed up piece of Hubba Bubba that you spit back into its paper wrapping. People who want gourmands to be taken seriously as a genre: this is what you’re up against. ★☆☆☆☆

Bois Talisman (Dior Privee)

In modern, mass produced perfumery there’s always been a certain level of copycat. I’m not talking about dupe perfumes, I’m talking about Coty making Emeraude and then Guerlain tweaking it into Shalimar.

There’s only so many ways perfume notes and accords can be structured together, and when a certain structure becomes a bestseller every brand wants a version in their line up. I think of this less like outright copyright theft and more like fragrance genres or literary styles - though someone certainly made the first chypre perfume, I don’t think anyone would say that any one brand owns the chypre structure.

Designer brands have done this dance since modern perfumery began - it’s nothing new. But every so often the great houses will strike out and take the next step, set the vanguard, release a perfume structure or style that everyone else then copies. In the 50’s and 60’s, and the 80’s and 90’s, the trendsetter house was often Dior.

And Dior is the great house that just kept getting greater, the bulwark that Bernard Arnault Frankensteined into the behemoth that we now know as LVMH.

Fastforward to 2025 and LVMH not only owns Dior but Guerlain and Sephora and Fenty and Acqua di Parma and Tiffany and Givenchy, and on and on. But Dior is still the jewel in its crown. It is maybe inevitable that once the conglomerate acquired Maison Francis Kurkdjian it would appoint the most famous perfumer in the world to head Dior Parfums.

The Kurkdjian era of Dior hasn’t gotten off to a roaring start. Honestly it’s a pretty thankless job, with not a lot of room for innovation and a high expectation to deliver, and deliver, and deliver… And it was as I was smelling the newest Dior Privee, Bois Talisman, that I had a strange thought: when was the last time that Dior had created a perfume that inspired imitation?

For the life of me, I couldn’t think of one. The hirsute among us might say Sauvage, but Sauvage is a riff on Aventus - an imitator, not an innovator. Dior Homme, maybe? Addict? I couldn’t land on a clear answer. I couldn’t pin down the exact moment Dior had lost its way.

But lost it is, as Bois Talisman shows us so clearly. It’s a boring, safe, guaranteed to sell perfume because it smells exactly like By The Fireplace, Margiela’s hit chestnut and vanilla monstrosity. Talisman is smoother, chicer, a very pretty and very pointless vanilla-amber. It has a slight lactonic quality to it, I assume bowing to the current taste for milky perfumes in the gourmand world, but if you’re looking for an amber from Dior there are ten perfumes I’d point you to before this one.

It’s my unfortunate luck that the Dior Privee bottles are only stocked in the high end designer booths in the middle of Sydney City, but I brave them a few times a year in the hopes I can get in, spray and sniff, and get the hell out without speaking to anyone.

No such luck when I smelled Bois Talisman - a saleswoman walked up to me as I was trying, clumsily, to reattach the magnet bottle cap.

She made opening salvos. I tried to suggest, without saying outright, that I wasn’t going to buy anything and she didn’t need to stay and chat.

No dice. We talked further and, as always happens when I get flustered, I attempted to explain that I’m really just a weird perfume person here to sniff everything and then bounce.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, have you smelled our new Esprit de Parfums?’

I said I had not. She proceeded to spray them, methodically, onto labelled blotters.

She watched as I smelled. I tried to make my facial expressions positive as I did so.

‘Do you like Kurkdjian’s style?’ I asked her.

‘Mmm,’ she said. I perked up. There’s nothing better than an honest salesperson. ‘A bit hit and miss.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah. My favourite Dior of his is actually Eau Noire, so I was happy to see that back.’

‘Oh, we have a bottle of that! Would you like a sample?’

‘Yes,’ I said, with the fervent hope of the wandering man in the desert who has just seen an oasis.

She walked to the back of the store and opened a drawer where a mostly full, forest green bottle of Eau Noire was rolling around.

‘I don’t have a blotter with the name,’ she said, and sprayed it on a spare blotter for Bois Talisman.

It’s been a long time since I’ve smelled Eau Noire. If you’ve never had the pleasure, let me describe it for you: it’s a green amber-fougere thing that is built around a push and pull between lavender and licorice; there’s a funky immortelle note prowling around that sometimes smells like maple syrup and sometimes smells like curry. There’s leather; there’s vanilla; there’s saffron and violet and bitter herbs. It is the weirdest combination of fucked up notes that should not work together but somehow sing in a perfect, bizarre harmony.

It is so good. It’s hard to smell Eau Noire compared to Bois Talisman and remember that this is the same perfumer, the same brand, and that the only difference between them is time.

I spent a minute or two catching up with Eau Noire in silent bliss. The saleswoman wandered back to me eventually.

‘It’s lucky you mentioned it. We don’t really keep this one on display,’ the saleswoman told me. ‘It’s a little difficult.’

‘Yes, it is.’

And because I am the most awkward person alive as soon as I set foot in a designer store I found myself saying,

‘But you know what, that’s okay! I like difficult things.’

★★☆☆☆