SUMMER SCENTS
Let’s be honest about it: The desire to walk around smelling like a fruit basket is, at its core, an embarrassing one.
It’s almost prelapsarian, this physical yearning to not only eat the ripe apple, but also to rub it all over your skin.
The smells of fruit flesh are, after all, some of the first alluring aromas we grasp.
Children learn to distinguish between the milky scent of mashed banana and the sour zing of an orange wedge long before they ever engage with a flower.
Fruits are, in essence, the primary colours of the fragrance wheel. With a few exceptions, their smells are easy and accessible: Sugary and tart, creamy and honeyed.
This is why, when we think of fruit-based perfumes, we tend to think of adolescent body splashes — those raspberry spritzes that teenagers splurge on at the mall.
Even the fruit emoji are the most playfully immature of the bunch: If you don’t know what the little cartoon peach is supposed to signify, well, ask the nearest seventh-grader and watch her snicker.
There is a darker side to fruit fragrances, too. In theory, they are perfect for summer.
But in practice, they are far tougher to pull off, especially in the heat. If the juicy notes are too sweet, they can easily skew too boozy, like a too-strong painkiller cocktail at a tiki bar.
Just as tangerines begin to go soupy if left in the sun, there is always a subtle undertone of decay in fruit perfume; wearing one can be like grafting a memento mori painting directly onto your body. Pineapple essence in excess smells a bit like feet; too much coconut and you begin to smell like condensed milk.
Still, fruit-forward perfumes remain popular summer after summer precisely because of their ephemeral, childlike appeal. They feel truly seasonal, suited for languid afternoons and balmy nights.
This year a new crop of sophisticated fruit scents has arrived, with far more finesse, imagination and subtle charm than the saccharine offerings of summers past. The time for fruit salad fragrances, one might say, is ripe.
Goop, Edition 04 Orchard
Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop has been quietly churning out some wonderfully strange scents.
For example, its first fragrance, Church, is meant to evoke “the centuries-old floorboards in a mountain chapel in Yugoslavia,” while another, Shiso, is a gutsy mixture of bitter green and frosty mint notes.
Orchard, its newest perfume ($165 for 50 millilitres), is perhaps the oddest of the bunch. The star here is a spot-on re-creation of a fresh apricot, a fruit rarely seen in perfumery because it is so difficult to capture.
What keeps the scent from becoming cloying is a generous base of hay, which smells like salted butter and sweet grass. This one is so full-bodied that it could keep well into the fall.
Acqua di Parma, Chinotto di Liguria
The acerbic chinotto orange is not very popular outside Italy, but it should be. It comes from the squat citrus myrtifolia (or myrtle-leaved orange tree) and grows primarily in sunny stretches of the Mediterranean coast.
The best chinotto essence comes from Liguria, a beachy zone of northwestern Italy (think the thigh area of the boot), where the golf ball-size fruits are harvested and squeezed into dark syrups for bitter, refreshing sodas.
San Pellegrino Chinotto is a caramel-colored tonic that goes down like an aperitif; Italians guzzle it in warm months to cool their insides and aid in digestion.
Acqua di Parma’s new fragrance ($107 for 75 millilitres) smells exactly like this beverage tastes, just without the carbonation. It is bitter, bracing and invigorating to wear. You will want to garnish yourself with a lemon peel.
Vilhelm Perfumarie, Mango Skin
The base of this brand-new scent ($245 for 100 millilitres) from New York perfume house Vilhelm is “kir cocktail,” a French concoction of crème de cassis and white wine.
On top of the berries and cream base layer is a rush of pungent flowers (tropical frangipani and ylang-ylang) and, finally, a sticky gloss of mango pulp.
Wearing this perfume is like ordering one of those boat drinks that comes in a fish bowl, then drinking it all yourself. This is not necessarily a bad thing! It just means that you will feel quite tipsy and inclined to dance.
EB Florals, Future Bloom
Eric Buterbaugh is one of Hollywood’s busiest floral designers. From his flower shop on Melrose Avenue, he designs elaborate bouquets for the likes of Gwen Stefani, Salma Hayek and the Beverly Hills Hotel.
In 2015, he expanded into fragrance, hoping that his savvy eye for blooms would cross over into distilling their essences. It worked. His floral soliflores are some of the prettiest you will find.
His perfume Fragile Violet, rumoured to be one of Naomi Campbell’s favourites, is a decadent whisper, like wearing a satin slip.
For the opening of his New York shop, tucked into a back corner of the second floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, he created Future Bloom ($295 for 100 millilitres), his first foray into fruit.
The neon green juice is a citrus bomb. It contains grapefruit, tangerine, lemons, limes, bergamot and a hint of raw rhubarb. It is enough to make your lips pucker, but spicy ginger cuts through the sourness. This is the perfume equivalent of lemonade in a heat wave.
Diana Vreeland, Staggeringly Beautiful
Diana Vreeland, who died in 1989, was the editor of Vogue and a true eccentric. Her long-running column “Why Don’t You?” was a mixture of fashion tips and absurdist outsider art; she encouraged women to cover their rooms in pink felt, wear violet velvet mittens and wash their daughters’ hair in Champagne.
In 2014, Vreeland’s grandson Alexander introduced a perfume house in her honour, giving the fragrances hyperbolic names in the style of her florid prose.
There’s Devastatingly Chic, Smashingly Brilliant and, now, Staggeringly Beautiful ($185 for 50 millilitres), which is a bottle full of figs. The perfume features not only the seeded fruit, but also the herbaceous notes of the fig tree itself, giving the wearer a sort of holistic produce aisle experience.
Diana herself would have approved. One of her signature beauty tips was: Wear a fruit hat.
Caswell-Massey, Marem
The U.S. fragrance house Caswell-Massey, around since 1752 (it made George Washington’s cologne), is rebranding to connect to a new generation. It has changed its bottles, but it is also returning to its roots: Marem is a re-creation of a scent made in 1914 for Russian actress Alla Nazimova, the grande dame of the New York stage who was preparing to make her silent film debut.
A glamorous vamp, she lived in an extravagant Hollywood mansion she called the Garden of Allah.
One can assume she swanned around the place in capes and caftans wearing this scent, which is a punchy cocktail of roses and red currants.
The new formulation ($110 for 50 millilitres) includes even more berry notes. The scent is as close as you will come to smelling like elegant pie filling.
Amouage, Imitation Woman
For the last few seasons, the house of Amouage has been focused on light, high-femme florals. And while everyone loves a good flower perfume, this has been a strange turn for the Oman line, which made its name with dank, intoxicating elixirs of oud and amber with mythical names like Memoir, Fate and Epic.
Lucky for us, Amouage is getting some of its old mojo back.
Imitation is a grand return to heady maximalism. The heart of the perfume ($310 for 100 millilitres) is black currant and licorice, which makes it smell like thick jam.