Good evening, Now Smell This: it has recently come to my attention (to paraphrase actor Drew Droege playing “Chloé Sevigny”) that I crave gourmand perfumes. At least, that’s what a dozen “trend pieces” have recently told me. The trend cycle goes around and around, of course: people have liked wearing vanilla-accented and/or sweet-smelling fragrances for a long time, whether you look back a century to Guerlain Shalimar or just twenty-odd years to Bath & Body Works Warm Vanilla Sugar, Aquolina Pink Sugar and Britney Spears Fantasy (with its then-novel “cupcake accord”). Where to begin, if you’re curious about some of the latest gourmand scents? New releases are spawning at an unprecedented rate these days, and I can’t even pretend to be fully up-to-date, but here are two freshly “baked” fragrances that I’m enjoying, plus one from 2021 that has also captured my imagination.
I’ve been trying for a while to make the term “fleurmand” catch on, but it hasn’t, which is a shame because I’d love to use it here to describe Régime des Fleurs Fleur Éclair…