i can’t be the first to say this but the sudden widespread intereset in perfumes in the last couple of years feels like an inevitable, obvious result of the pandemic. after all those zoom calls, a little signal, “here i am, in the flesh.”
i’d gotten a few samples at the department store in high school (do you think they’re more close-fisted with those lately? are department store pefume samples a low-interest-rate phenomenon?) but at the endish of 2021 i started buying perfume samples by the dozen, mostly choosing them from luca turin & tania sanchez’ recommendations in their various books. the writing is so fun that i feel a little embarrassed even trying my hand at writing perfume reviews. but i will anyway
the point of this is that i have smelled a lot of perfumes from different companies, at different price points, & i can very strongly recommend these three cheap ones.
tommy girl
yes, the one your older sister wore in high school. i think people are a little surprised when i wax rhapsodic about this one because it’s so like “popular girl in a turn-of-the-millenium hs romcom who realizes she was all wrong about what really matters.” certainly if you want something that makes you feel unusual, mysterious, in-the-know about obscure scents, tommy girl is not going to do it. & it can feel incredibly weird to wear something that used to be popular & is on the wane. but god, this one is tasteful. there are very few scents that achieve this level of freshness without being screechy & detergenty. so bubbly & lighthearted with its flowers & mandarin & mint at the beginning that it’s hard to believe it will settle into a tea-and-cedar maturity at the end. like going to a high school reunion, finding out the queen bee is looking better than ever, & realizing she was never as shallow as you thought
ck one
also incredibly, incredibly popular around the turn of the millenium—but i hear y2k is back. they sold these babies in record stores, & made good money doing it. my theory is that this citrus-y scent kind of enabled the grunge aesthetic: it’s so clean & fresh that it made it very easy to tell people who were choosing to dress grungey apart from people who were just dirty.
i described tommy girl as clean/fresh too; i guess the difference is between tommy girl’s kind of “cool clean” & ck one’s “warm clean".” the citrus is backed up by tropical fruit & a little spice & sandalwood.
tocade
another mid 90’s one! i didn’t do this on purpose. the other two were clean; when people are talking about perfume, i think clean usually means not “the opposite of dirty” but “the opposite of perfume-y”, and this is definitely the perfume-iest of the bunch. rose & vanilla. something for nice girls. i think that like niche brands & fancy people can be a little scared to touch this sweet, girly aesthetic because it’s not totally unlike the kind of thing you could get at victoria’s secret. but this one is just done perfectly. fun & unpretentious & simple & not headache sweet or tryhard. & the bottle is wearing the cutest little hat
I am always amused to find that something I thought I was doing on my own is actually part of a larger trend! I briefly got really Into Fragrance in mid-2022 and bought at least a dozen samples from a handful of different parfumeries (which for me is a lot!), and sniffed a bunch more on those little slips of paper at Ulta and Sephora. I was constantly reading about the different aroma chemicals and absolutes.
I do agree that there's something about fragrance--invisible, silent, but very physical and immediate--that's the antithesis of disembodied digital existence. In retrospect I'm not surprised that I was unknowingly tapping into some zeitgeist.
here are my two guesses on the lack of sample availability
-it seems to track the decline of department store quality generally
-now that we’ve learned about Good Scents, the same quantity of samples is much less impressive, because we can dismiss most of them immediately