On perfume snobbery and the simple joys of saccharine teenybopper scents

If you can’t execute on luxury then have some honour and drop the pretence

Some weekends back I spent the better part of a Saturday snooping through the old Liberty department store. It’s a refurbished Tudor building, and they’ve more or less kept the original layout of small rooms and pokey corridors, that all culminates in a feeling of exploration and whimsy. If you’ve ever read The Secret Garden (my favourite novel as a 8 year old, shout out to the Scholastic Bookfair) then you can approximate the experience to Mary creeping through the myriad of rooms in the manor, all filled with wondrous trinkets. Except instead of solitude you’ll have the battle hoards of tourists and influencers and other assorted flotsam of society. And instead of abandoned trinkets you’ll have mostly overpriced niche designer goods. But I’m not talking about buildings and urban design today (though that is coming), or even a jaw dropping vintage Hermès crocodile doctors bag (that even though priced at the average yearly salary in the UK, I’m tempted to ask for as a birthday present), no dear reader: I’m here to talk about PERFUME.

More specifically how fucking sick I am of the whole gambit.

*it’s this but in better condition. Glossier leather, more vibrant gold hardware etc. I was going to insert the actual photo I took of it in its glass display box but my reflection was way too visible.

If you were around for my recent tirade on eroticism and it’s lack thereof in modern society and consumerism, you can already see where this is going.

Within the ground floor of Liberty you’ll be bombarded with shelves upon shelves of perfumes. There’s all the basic names you’d expect to see on a garden-variety “rich girl” instagrammers page: Byredo (snore), Le Labo (snore), Diptyque (snore), things of that ilk. You’ll also find innumerable niche brands and names that even I haven’t come across before, which I’m not going to bother listing here for time constraints.

My issue is the lack of proper execution in all the products I saw. This can be further clarified in two ways: they lacked viscera and luxury appeal, or they lacked proper material execution.

An example of the first would be… pretty well all of them. Despite their price points alluding to a luxury experience, you pick up the bottles and smell them, and it very quickly becomes apparent that it’s all a branding facade. They’re not terrible per se, but they lack considerably. There’s no viscerally rich scents, or complexity, or gorgeous heavy bottles in unique designs. The luxury alluded to in the price isn’t present, nor is any simple sensory joy encompassed.

And look, perhaps there were truly gems hidden amongst the hundreds of perfumes stocked there, but after smelling however many you get olfactory fatigue, and everything starts blending together. Not too mentioned I’m a picky bitch and if I get so much as a hint of acrid from a perfume I have to resist the urge to lob it out a window. Add in the maddening crowd of C-tier influencers and you can see why I wasn’t capable to giving each and every perfume its fair dues. I acknowledge the limitations of my analysis. But my blanket verdict on their offering is: blegh.

Let me also gripe about one parfumerie in particular: Killian. The only reason I’m so mad about this one, is that they got so so close to making an absolutely perfect product in terms of olfactory, visual, and tactile pleasure. And then they willingly ruined the entire thing at the last minute. Specifically I’m talking about Angels Share, a sweet yet complex and almost woody (?) spray I could see myself using on the daily. The whole concept of their line was so sexy: cut crystal whiskey decanter (which makes sense because Killian is the heir to the Hennessy liquor family). The bottle was cylindrical cut glass and heavy in your hand in the type of way that feels incredibly satisfying, and the craftsmanship on the cutting meant it refracted light through the amber perfume inside in the most beautiful way. It was, simply, a delight. And then they made the large cap on top in the same design in fuck-ugly bloated PLASTIC. It didn’t refract light at all, the cuts were bubbled and warped in a way that looked totally different to the cuts in the glass, it felt cheap and lightweight, and it ruined the entire fucking vibe. You’re trying to tell me you have the wealth of the Hennessy liquor family behind you and you can’t spring for a glass cap on your perfume to go with the glass base? The lack of understanding on how to create and execute on items that tap into true eroticism makes me want to go postal. If you can’t execute on luxury then stop pretending you can! Do not lie!

Long time followers of The Squid will probably remember this weekend, and the spew of complaints I lobbed onto your feed about how if a brand is incapable of properly capturing luxury, then they should have some honour and go full teenybopper saccharine spritz and drop the pretence. And I stand by that.

Perfume snobbery, that is the creation of or purchasing of what is most luxe, most photogenic to put on your Instagram or God-fucking-forbid tiktok, or most “in” can be a bit of a dead end street. Sure, you may like a perfume that just so happens to have a higher price point, and that doesn’t count as snobbery because the brand and cost are irrelevant to the overall experience. But buying the expensive simply because it is expensive is a bit… soulless.

Do you remember what didn’t feel soulless? Do you remember buying and wearing perfume in early highschool, when pretty much everyone’s repertoire consisted of Victorias Secret body sprays, the Rhianna perfumes, the Beyoncé perfumes, the Britney perfumes? Sure the manufacturing and product development behind them was just as soulless as any other mass produced and marketed good, but your experience as the wearer? Simple joy. No arms race to be the most *insert internet buzz word*. No try-hard minimalist packaging, just eye catching bright designs that were tough enough to be tossed across the grass to a friend, before being thrown back into a locker or in your bag. I’m reminiscing here, I don’t know about you.

So, me being fed up as I was with the lack of eroticism and good execution in the high end perfume world, I made the pilgrimage back to Boots. And in a fit of angst and nostalgia I bought a little bottle of what was my heavy hitter through years 8-10 in highschool: Britney Spears midnight fantasy.

The funny thing is, I bought a that little bottle on a whim and I wasn’t expecting much from it again. But I’ve begun unironically wearing it on a weekly basis. My hand reaches to grab the delightfully tacky rhinestoned blue sphere, and I leave chemtrails of artificial sugar everywhere I walk that day, and I loveit.

I find myself snooping through small chemists and markets with indie sellers for 50ml bottles that don’t take themselves seriously, that are fun, that don’t try and make themselves appear anything other than they are: cheap and unique and unserious about themselves. Enjoyable because they are honest. There’s pleasure in that.

The pursuit of eroticism and sensory pleasure in only expensive things can be the rabbit that leads you down the foxhole. I think my takeaway from all of this is that you need to grab the joy in life wherever you find it, and sometimes places that overtly advertise themselves as a rich experience are actually bluffing. Maybe the sensory joy you’re looking for is to be found somewhere unexpected, somewhere from the past, somewhere commonplace. And maybe when you find that eroticism and joy in that common place, you should dig into that with your teeth ferverously, enjoying every last bite.

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Now, dear reader, I lay myself and my perfume tastes upon the chopping block that you may scrutinise them and hand me my verdict:

A) You have taste, so your opinions through this article on what constitutes a good perfume experience is probably valid, if not still just an opinion

B) You have shit taste, jump off a building

I mix and match these on a daily basis depending on the mood. It ranges from dark woody mens cologne, through spicy amber scents, to saccharine sugar a la Britney and Dolce. Deliberately excluded are acidic or patchouli / vertiver scents because they make my nose curl and I’ll never wear them.

• Hermès - terre d’Hermès

• Tom Ford - tobacco vanille

• Tom Ford - jasmine rouge

• Chanel - no. 5

• Dolce & Gabanna - the only one

• Britney Spears - midnight fantasy

• Jasmine essential oil

• Damascus rose essential oil

• Black pepper essential oil

• Assorted ouds from an independent seller in London

• “Opium” perfume oil i shoplifted from a crystal store when I was in high school and is lasting me to this day