There was a time in my life when I couldn’t get enough of sweet perfumes. In my early teenage years I considered the best perfumes to be Ralph by Ralph Lauren, a sweet fruit salad of a scent, and Anna Sui Dreams, a vanilla-infused floral. Later, it was the juicy blackberry and rose notes of Yves Saint Laurent’s Parisienne that saw me through university, and the fresh apple bite of DKNY’s iconic Be Delicious that I wore to my post-degree job interviews.
As I headed towards my mid-20s, however, and started working in the beauty industry, I noticed that when it came to sweet perfumes, people tended to be a little snobby about them. This was at a time when Le Labo’s Santal 33 still felt something like an industry insider secret, and the spicy, woody, musky notes were, to me, the epitome of what it meant to be a sophisticated woman with her life together. And with access to the kinds of expensive perfumes that I’d previously only dreamed of owning, I began to branch out.
