hot girl scents

perfume roundup for a sweaty girl summer

A few weeks ago an older auntie flagged me down on the streets (or rather, she yelled “young lady!” twice, which is when I realised she was specifically talking to me) to ask about the perfume I was wearing (Etat Libre d’Orange’s You or Someone Like You for the curious, a gorgeous green melange of mint and citrus with a base note of white musk). It was, bar none, the highlight of my month.

I’m kind of a perfume fiend, I don’t really know how else to describe it. My mom refers to me euphemistically as someone who “really knows how to enjoy life” (a.k.a. a profligate). I started using the money I wasn’t spending on rent / bills / groceries in 2021 and 2022 to build up a truly heinous collection of nice smelling things, and suddenly I’m in too deep. I search for notes on Fragrantica and know what LuckyScents is. I know that r/fragrance is filled with right wing tradcore weirdos and I read r/indiemakeupandmore regularly for reviews of perfume oils from houses like Alkemia and Death + Floral. I listen to a fraghead podcast, for heaven’s sake.

Now, as we’re wrapping up the last of summer, I wanted to do a little wrap-up of my own, of most-worn warm-weather perfumes.

1. You or Someone Like You, Etat Libre d’Orange. The one, the only, the head-turner and get-chased-down-the-streets…er. This is so fresh and green and minty, the perfect insouciantly cool LA girl summer scent. Wear this to the boardwalk for mojitos and oysters, linen dress pulled sloppily over salt-crusted bikini vibes; layer on sunscreen for hot summer nights, mid July, when you and I were, etc.

2. Supernatural, Alkemia. This is…ineffable. The website copy describes it as ethereal, and that’s exactly what this is. I feel like an angel when I wear this, the kind that only sups on milk, honey, & ambrosia. It’s soft and warm and airy and sweet at the same time, in a way that almost reminds me of animal crackers. Wear for a cool summer morning, late spring afternoon, wrapped up in your long-term boyfriend’s oversized sweatshirt and hot shorts, candlelit dinner and sweet-dreamy-evenings-that-don’t-really-feel-real-the-morning-after vibe.

3. You, Glossier. I have the solid version of this perfume, pre-reformulation so I can’t speak to how it currently smells, but this is a close-to-the-skin, your-scent-but-better perfume. It’s peppery, but not in a sharp way, with powdery florals, in an effortlessly-pretty-New-York-girl-shopping-in-a-Soho-boutique way. Results may vary, though—this seems like a very intensely personal scent, and how it smells seems very dependent on skin chemistry. On me it’s very subtle and lovely, but fades quickly.

4. Hybrid Perpetual, Stereoplasm. Buyer beware, Stereoplasm’s shipping is very shaky. My first order with them I received in two weeks and my second didn’t arrive for two months, and when it did come I received the wrong items, and it took another two months for them to dispatch the replacement. But I do keep buying because I keep loving their scents. Cool Weather Girl and Weather Girl are more autumnal fragrances for me, but Hybrid Perpetual is pure spring/summer. My first, and last, thought is of the Dashwoods’ cottage by the sea in the 2008 BBC adaptation of Sense & Sensibility—a prim and proper lady buffeted by the tides. It’s a strong, sharp, soapy floral, brings to mind cottagecore girlies in linen pinning up the laundry. I don’t get much of the rose, but I do smell oak moss, ozone, and honey.

5. Philosykos, Diptyque. This is as close as I get to a signature scent, given how many perfumes I have and how bad I am at making up my mind. It is figgy (so figgy, love figgy) green (so green, love green) and coconutty, and feels like a dappled nymph in a late summer glade. Wear to echo the name of your lover and wither away until only your voice lingers, or else to be transformed into a fawn ambling after a goddess of the hunt in the humid moonlight.

6. Bloom, Gucci. Jasmine can pull indolic, and while I love the lush, sensuous headiness it can bring, this isn’t that. This is very green (again, LOVE. GREEN.) and youthful—if Marc Jacobs’s Daisy is 16, Gucci Bloom reminds me of 22, and also of who I was at 22: sweet, fresh-faced and energetic, but ultimately a little floaty and untethered. Wear to be wrapped in pink tulle and yards of chiffon. A springtime and a springtime-of-life scent.

7. Finist the Falcon, Fantôme. Oh, how I love a rose! But it has to be a specific rose. I can’t do a Chanel rose, can’t do an old lady powdery rose, a heavy rose. It has to be light, it has to be dewy, it has to be jammy and delectable, a wild rose and not a stately one. Chloé’s eponymous perfume (well, Chloé) is actually my favourite rose scent (delicate, girlish), but Finist the Falcon comes a close second. It’s a wild rose, a rambling, northern rose that seeks true love. Wear for collecting berries to jam, best with a bandanna over sumptuous hair, a coarse linen apron, and purple-stained mouth; that I might drink and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim.

8. Filled with the Heat of a Reckless Summer, Death + Floral. I’m wearing this one right now and it is just. Delectable. Exactly as it says on the tin—it smells filled with the heat of a reckless summer! It goes on incredibly sweet but never with the overwhelming density that thickens on the back of your tongue, it’s a spun-sugar kind of sweet, like you’re boiling blueberries down into compote. It’s wheat fields flooded with radiant evening sun after a long day of running around in sandals and shorts. Fireflies coming up, a stuffy wind blowing you the scent of flowers. It lasts forever on me—I’ll find myself huffing at the air like a bloodhound like what is that delicious smell who could smell so fairylike and oh, right, c’est moi. Once the sweetness of the blueberries have passed, you’re left with a hazy, dreamlike hay-and-honeysuckle that is effervescent. It has a touch of the 19th century country ingenue about it, and I know it reminds me of a particular character but alas, her name escapes into the summer heat.

9. Pear, Inc., Juliette Has a Gun. JHAG is such an odd house. Not a Perfume, Lady Vengeance, and Gentlewoman almost turned me off them entirely—I don’t usually wear dense, smokey scents except in esoteric indie oils that specifically smell of things like charcoal and smoke and decay. I own a travel size of Lady Vengeance and I’m not sure why—I know I picked it up sometime early in college, but I don’t think I would have liked it then too, I never have loved dark, powdery roses. But Pear, Inc., man. What a delight! I initially bought a sample because I wanted a pear-forward scent without having to send $30 on a Liis discovery set (which I ended up doing anyway……and then dropping more for a full size of Bo and Rose Struck—another perfect rose that’s tied with Chloé, but I digress). But after I sprayed I just kept…….smelling myself. Similar to Filled with the Heat of a Reckless Summer, I would catch whiffs all day and kind of……fall in love? Like wow, who is the kind of girl who would wear that scent? She must be so interesting and alluring. It’s that good. It’s a skin scent that doesn’t sit close to the skin. It trails behind you all day, and there’s something just a touch musky about it that gives all the soft pear-ness an edge of sensuality, almost lustfulness. A ripe fruit, in all ways literal and metaphorical.

10. Milk, Dedcool. If Pear, Inc. is too loud for a true skin scent and You has a longevity of approximately 30 minutes, Milk is the perfect amalgamation of what I love the most about the others. It sits really close to the skin—you’d have to get really intimate to catch a whiff of this amber-forward scent, and it lasts for hours and hours on end. It amplifies anything you layer on top of it with warm depth and, if the opinion of one 18 year old boy with no taste at all can convince you, it is also the only scent my younger sibling wears. I’ll have to get a full-size of my own soon; I’ve been using his and spraying indiscriminately, but hey. I was the one who bought it.

11. Mediterranean Honeysuckle, Aerin. I know it says honeysuckle on the tin, but what this actually smells like is bright, juicy citrus, the kind that you bite into and drips onto your chin in the dry, endless heat of July. Whitewash, sparkling blue ocean, sipping Amaretto by the coast, a large, floppy sunhat and summer-kissed skin. Riding through Tuscany on the back of a handsome stranger’s Vespa. I wore this on vacation in Morocco in 2019, so it will always remind me of blue walls, the Mediterranean Sea, and a growing sense of panic and alarm that came with the realization that I was about to be asked out by a 17 year old child (I was 22). A real mixed bag, emotionally, but otherwise a very pretty scent.

12. Nomade, Chloé. My other signature scent, but if Philosykos is my everyday floaty dreamy hippie girl about town perfume, Nomade is my 9-5, my let’s get down to business to defeat the Huns. We are girl bossing, we are slay queening, we are a midtwenties, midtown girl, not old enough to be promoted out of assisting but not a new hire either, the kind of not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman who feels like she has her life together enough to finally wear heels to the office; Chloé Nomade is for heroines—not ingenues.