What does your pores and skin odor like proper now? Does it odor like vanilla, sheer musk, or cleaning soap? Is it powdery and contemporary or creamy and alluring? Do you detect delicate woody notes, a touch of rose, or maybe a little bit of iris and pink pepper?
When you answered “sure” to the final one, chances are high you’re most likely sporting Glossier You, the sweetness model’s mega-successful hero perfume, a bottle of which is bought about each 20 seconds. It promised to be the “final private perfume,” mingling along with your physique chemistry to odor like, properly, you. Since its 2017 arrival, You has arguably turn into the twenty first century equal to Chanel No. 5 or Thierry Mugler Angel: a scent so ubiquitous, so beloved, so widespread that it shakes up your complete business.
And shake up the perfume business it actually did. Following Glossier’s swimsuit, dozens of perfume manufacturers starting from tiny indies to division retailer mainstays have developed skin-inspired scents, that are typically composed of mild amber, musk, and wooden notes. They revitalized an already-existing (suppose Kiehl’s Musk, which launched in 1963, and Sarah Jessica Parker’s Pretty from 2005) however comparatively dormant perfume class that now doesn’t appear to be fading any time quickly.
We’re deep on this perfume period, my mates. As Attract reported in late 2024, the ever-popular gourmand perfume class is shifting even additional away from its conventional vanilla-forward codecs and are as an alternative leaning into milky and rice notes—which simply so occur to mix proper in with skin-centric notes like musk and ambroxan. Does this imply we’ve reached peak pores and skin scent? I’m gonna go forward and say sure—and beg everybody to strive one thing new.
I’m totally conscious of why it looks as if each new perfume has the phrase “pores and skin” in its identify or its advertising copy. If it’s promoting, why change it? Perfume developments are cyclical; simply as the recognition of sure denim silhouettes wax and wane, so too do the buying public’s fragrance preferences. We noticed the same motion again within the early ‘90s, when ethereal, contemporary scents (Calvin Klein’s CK One, Issey Miyake’s L’Eau de Issey) grew to become widespread as a response to the opulent, clear-the-room scents of the ‘80s (Giorgio Beverly Hills, Dior Poison). It is sensible that we’d be so keen to return to fundamentals after syrupy fruitchoulis, spicy ouds, and Santal 33s dominated the 2010s. Our noses have been drained! The cultural local weather was altering!
