Year's End

Newsletter #48: a giveaway, a fig perfume, and a thank you

Dec 28, 2025

How is it possible that 2025 has gone so quickly and also feels like it’s been dragging on for three years? Maybe it’s the chaotic pace of world events post COVID - or maybe I feel like this every time December slides into January.

This time of year in Australia is scented with eucalyptus, champagne, and the coconutty tang of sunscreen. In the mornings I find myself reaching for things that I can spray in abundance and that will mingle with the taste of salt water: Grey Vetiver, Olympea, Green Spell, Montserrat.

I’m not really one for “best of” lists (creating them, I mean. I love reading them) because I haven’t smelled every new release in 2025. Perfume is a hobby that is centered around consumerism, and you have to build guard rails for yourself if you want to keep it sustainable. I am therefore very boring: I prioritize samples over buying full bottles, artisan and small batch over mass production, and buying slowly throughout the year.

I haven’t bought many bottles of perfume this year - probably about five or six. Some of them were repurchases of perfumes I lost a few years ago. But for our last article of 2025 I thought I’d tell you about a new perfume in my collection.

In my corner of the world we have a sort of fool’s autumn where it stays humid and warm from March to May. It’s only after Easter that the temperature starts to drop and I emerge from my chrysalis to finally wear stockings and layers and maybe, if I’m really lucky, even a jacket. Life is as it should be.

In May this year I took a short trip with my family to Bowral, which is a quaint and beautiful town about an hour south of Sydney. Bowral is a dream: little Victorian laneways, autumn foliage in every shade from ochre to crimson to mahogany brown, antique and thrifting stores around every other corner. Give me a dirty chai and set me loose on this town. It’s cold enough to wear scarves and this is my Superbowl.

I was leaving one such antique store when I noticed a temptingly open door strung with fairy lights. There’s a very specific kind of homewares slash wellness slash perfume store that you can sometimes find in small towns like Bowral if there’s enough bougie tourists who pass through. They always sell random handbags and fancy soaps and seem like they are skippable but then will also be the only store in Australia that stocks some randomly brilliant artisanal perfume brand.

I make sure to never skip a store like that. I once walked into one, saw an entire wall of Prin Lomros perfumes, and nearly started crying.

This store had the perfect conditions for an extended sniff: there was no one else there, the salesperson was polite but left me alone, and the collection was very well curated. I never leave my house without a blotters and a pen in my bag, so I got to work immediately. My family hung around for three or four perfumes and then waited patiently on a wrought iron garden seat for the rest. It was a bright and cold day. We were going to a Breton creperie for dinner, and there were still a dozen perfumes to smell. I was in heaven.

You can smell a lot of great things, but there’s something different about a perfume you think you’d actually wear. There are many perfumes that I admire and even love that I know I won’t reach for in my day to day. There’s a delineation in my mind between appreciating a perfume as a work of art and taking it over that borderline into the grooves of my life. It still feels like magic when you find a perfume that you want to add to your collection. I appreciate them for the rarities that they are.

I didn’t expect to find a perfume like that in Bowral. But as I smelled through the collection of local perfumer Samuel Gravan, lightning struck in the form of the funkiest fig perfume I’ve smelled in a long time. It’s called Woody Fig, a golden-amber potion in a no nonsense bottle that spoke to me immediately.

I have found that you’re either a lover or a hater of fig in perfumery. It is, to be fair to the haters, a fucking bizarre note to wrap your head around. A good fig perfume is green and stemmy and harsh but also warm and coconutty and lactonic and lush, almost sickly. Some days all I want to smell is fig, and some days the thought makes me nauseous. I’m always drawn back to it, though - I think it just might be the most compelling fruit note in all of fragrance.

So, Woody Fig. A little gem of a perfume that takes the classic Giacobetti Premier Figuier - Philosykos dynamism of the perfumer’s fig and makes it deeper, weirder, fuller, darker. There’s a botanical, almost Etsy dabber-bottle quality to the thing. I like when perfumers aren’t scared to embrace the confronting aspects of natural materials, even if it will render their perfumes too earth-mother for some people. The scent is given a glowing luminosity from amyris and an almost bitter woodiness from a fir note that made me feel delightfully witchy as I smelled it.

It’s a bizarre perfume, but odd in all the ways that made it right for me. I didn’t buy the bottle right then (I told you I am slow and considered in these things!), but I did buy a sample and wore it through to the end. That’s my first test when considering a full bottle. If I use the sample, I can think about making the investment. Happily, Samuel Gravan sells his scents in many different sizes and formats - another huge tick in my book, as accessibility is everything in perfume.

A few months after the Bowral trip I bought a 30ml bottle of Woody Fig. I wear it on the days when all I want to listen to is Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac and think about casting spells.

I have a story for every bottle of perfume I own. Like any collector or any hobbyist, the fragments of my life are woven through the bottles. For more than any other reason I bought Woody Fig because smelling it on that perfect day in Bowral gave me one of those moments, rare and bright, where it occurred to me that I could take this piece of art and bring it into my home, into my life; I could have it keep me company on long days in the office and nights that dip cold and dark. I could make memories scented just like this, the process of wearing a perfume making it yours like reading a book gives you the power to make it your own, greater than the sum of its parts.

I smelled Woody Fig and closed my eyes and thought:

God, I love perfume.

And I do. I really do.

for auld lang’s syne

I have an optimist’s love for the end of the year. I think less about what has passed than the great potential of what’s to come.

That being said, what a bloody year it’s been.

I confess that I am a planner and usually spend the last week of December setting down goals and new routines for the year to come. I don’t stick to all of them. But I stick to some of them, and I try to remind myself to not let perfect be the enemy of good. At the start of this year I made a goal to post on Substack every single Sunday. There have been weeks where that felt impossible, but I’ve managed to pull it off and I am quite proud of myself for that!

I’ll be taking a short break in the first two weeks of January, and I’m so excited to plan for Fumes in 2026. Some half-drafts and ideas I have already include an article on dupe culture, thoughts on L’Entropiste and other traditional perfumer gone solo brands, an analysis of the bizarre world of perfume at Zara, a deep dive on Frederic Malle, and so much more.

(I’ve also got an empty page with the title ‘the scent of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree’ sitting in my drafts. No idea what I was thinking at the time. But it is a good concept to chew on...)

The guiding principle of Fumes is that perfume is an art form that deserves exploration and analysis. Perfume is sensual. It is emotional. The industry that has grown around perfume can be cynical and dark. What I try to do - and will continue to do - is to write about how these things interweave with our lives.

We can talk with ease about the impact of the things we see and hear and touch and taste. I want to carve out equal room for smell.

In her 1964 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argues that the sensory impact of art is being lost under a wave of critical analysis that does not enhance the experience of art but reduces it. She writes:

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there... Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. What is important now is to recover our senses.
We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

Perfumery is a sensory art form above all else.

Fragrance is performative, certainly, but also transformative because it makes us feel. A great scent can be inspiring. A signature scent can be comforting. A bold scent can be unnerving. These feelings are immediate and visceral. The sensory rules all in perfume; it is by its nature the form that Sontag is searching for, art that needs to be experienced and felt for one’s own before you can even begin to construct thought around it.

All the other elements of a perfume - price, creator, context, content, form - can be sloughed away and one can focus only on a feeling, and you would still be able to describe a perfume. I don’t know of any other art forms for which this is possible.

This is what makes perfume magical.

We can use perfume to explore gender, our relationship with our bodies, cultural stereotypes, fear, grief, and world events. We can use the art of perfume to discuss the impact of capital on the fragrance industry, how companies can stifle creativity, and how the love of scent transfers to the next generation. When I talk about perfume literacy and a culture of olfaction this is what I mean - and what I hope I am helping to build, in my own small way.

We must learn to see more, hear more, feel more - smell more.

Recover your senses.

Breathe in some perfume.

I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has read, supported, liked, subscribed, commented, or pledged to Fumes this year. I started writing about perfume for an audience of exactly one - myself - and I still write that way. It’s really nice to know that there are other people who want to read the things I write too. Your comments and kind words are bright spots in my long weeks.

In the new year I’m planning to do another Q&A post, so if there’s anything you’d like to ask me please drop a question below. (I’ve never used the Substack survey form before, so here’s hoping it works….!)

Ask me anything!

a giveaway

‘Tis the season: I have finally gone through and organized my sample Bin of Shame, and I’d like to run a giveaway to send some samples to a Fumes reader. The samples will be a mix of indie, artisan, designer, niche, and more, in plenty of different formats from solid to extrait. I’ve included perfumes I have written about this year and many more - I hope you find something that sparks your senses.

Conditions of entry

None. You don’t have to be a subscriber, just a reader of this sentence. I will ship anywhere in the world that I am legally able. You just have to be someone who loves perfume.

How do I enter?

Submit your name, email, and a short description of what you love most about perfume below. I’ll randomly draw a winner and email them for their address and mailing details. The winner will be drawn and contacted by email on 11 January.