My Signature Scents
A review on my top ten perfumes
I work with people all day, and I've never thought of perfume as something I wear for myself. It's part of what I leave behind in a room — the same way a tone of voice is, or the way you greet someone. Smelling good is the minimum; what I'm actually after is the impression, and the small pleasure of making someone's few minutes with me a little nicer.
Which is why I'm heavy-handed with it. I over-spray, always have, and I go through bottles far faster than I should. So most of mine live in travel size: easier to carry, easier to top up during the day, and easier to rotate without ever getting tired of the same one.
No gifted products, no partnerships. Just what's on my shelf.
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Ten bottles, built up over years rather than bought as a set. Mostly floral, fruity and gourmand — a pattern I only noticed once I lined them up. At work, the question I get asked most often isn't about what I do; it's what I'm wearing. That recurring question is what turned a personal habit into something worth writing down.
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Organised by mood, not by house. Grouping by brand would say something about my spending; grouping by occasion says something about how I read fragrance — as wardrobe rather than collection. Each bottle is described by the accords I actually perceive, not the pyramid the brand publishes, and by the moment I reach for it. Where my nose disagrees with the official notes, I say so.
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Perfume is where brand narrative is most exposed. A house sells the same molecule as its competitor and wins on story alone: heritage, city, a name, a memory. Reading my own shelf is small-scale practice for the analysis I do at brand level. The consumer and the analyst are using the same muscle.
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Taste is a form of criteria when you can explain it. Fragrance is the clearest case study in luxury communication: no proof, no function, only narrative. And knowing a category from the inside — as someone who buys it, wears it and gets asked about it — is a different kind of knowledge from studying it at a distance.
The Signature
The one that works almost anywhere.
Donna Born in Roma
vanilla wrapped in jasmine · pink pepper · blackcurrant
A regular under my Christmas tree. Valentino sells it as a set — the full bottle, the travel size and a body cream — so I can smell like it at any hour of the day. I've stopped pretending that's an accident: it's how a house turns a perfume into a routine. It worked on me.
The Romantics
Soft, floral, close to the skin.
Miss Dior Blooming Bouquet
rose · fresh peony · mandarin
The first perfume that made me fall in love with this world. The first one I wore to my first job. And the first that ever got me compliments.
Miss Dior Rose N' Roses
rose de Grasse · damask rose · mandarin · musk
Blooming Bouquet's bolder sister: rose at full volume, built from two of its most prized varieties. I found them together in the same discovery set, but this one came in an unusual format — a solid roll-on. The perfect booster, and small enough to live in my bag.
Fleur Majesty Rose Royale | 31
rose · peony · pear · peach · mandarin
As a Sephora regular and a fragrance obsessive, I'd been meaning to try Kayali for months. The branding is what pulled me in: founded by Mona Kattan, Huda's sister; a number on every bottle telling you how many formulation rounds it took to get there — thirty-one, for this one; and a whole architecture of scents built to be layered. I started with the mini.
The Playful Ones
Fruit-forward, easy, made for daylight.
Dylan Purple
juicy pear · bergamot · orange · freesia
Duty free is the perfect place to discover a new fragrance. The violet bottle caught my eye and it was love at first sight — it has been a favourite, and a repurchase, ever since. One Christmas it turned up as a matching set with body cream and shower gel, and we became inseparable.
Eden Plush Pear | 23
ripe pear · mandarin · freesia · coconut water · vanilla caviar
Rose Royale was gone in under a month and I needed another mini for my bag. Still on my Kayali mission, I was torn between this and Juicy Apple from the same Eden line. The apple felt too sweet for everyday, so I went with the pear for its softness — riper than Dylan Purple's, with vanilla caviar giving it the grown-up edge.
Fame in Love
strawberry · vanilla · jasmine · basil
TikTok would not stop showing it to me — influencers dressed in red, eating strawberries. I'd smelled Rabanne before, the original Fame and Olympéa, and liked neither. But strawberry is my favourite fruit, so I gave it a chance anyway. I fell for it and put it on my birthday wish list. For better or worse, the bottle ran out before the summer did.
The Bombshells
Loud on purpose. Night only.
Viva la Juicy Noir
wild berries · caramel · amber
El Corte Inglés in the middle of the winter sales, with a friend who helped me choose. The brand wasn't on my radar at all — but I lean towards the intense version of everything, and berries are berries. I took the bet.
Donna Born in Roma Intense
jasmine · vanilla · amber
A more dangerous version of Born in Roma: the vanilla and the jasmine are still there, now darkened by amber. On a cruise holiday we were handed a voucher to spend on board, so I picked it up in the duty free — small format, so it would fit in the suitcase on the way home.
Flowerbomb Extreme
raspberry · vanilla · rose — my three pillars in one bottle
When I joined Her Campus during my exchange semester in New York, the club had a partnership with this fragrance, which had just launched, and handed out samples at every event. At one of their dinners they ran a raffle for a full bottle — and I won it. It became the soundtrack of my time in New York, except in scent.
On my wish list
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L'Heure Bleue — Guerlain
Guerlain reopened one of its own monuments: the 1912 original now carries its date, and this new composition takes the bare name. I smelled it and went straight to a cruise ship at night — standing on deck, breathing in the sea air. Cold, blue, open. Nothing else in my collection smells like this.
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La Favorite — Jean Paul Gaultier
Built around the Queen of the Night, a flower that blooms once a year and only after dark. I read that before I smelled it, and then I understood why they chose it: it's the same effect in a bottle — something that shouldn't be as captivating as it is.
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Paradoxe — Prada
The name did half the work. I work at the Paradox Museum, where my colleagues have appointed me the best-smelling of the staff, so the joke writes itself: Paradoxe should be our house scent. Between that and the samples Sephora keeps slipping into my bag, it is only a matter of time.
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Black Opium Pink Glaze — YSL
Full disclosure: I haven't smelled this one yet. It's here because of the campaign — that dark, seductive Black Opium vibe pulled me in first, and when I saw there was a strawberry version, it went straight on the list.
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Eden Juicy Apple | 01 — Kayali
My collection runs on pear, rose and strawberry. Apple is the gap. I turned this one down once for being too sweet, and I've been curious about it ever since — the fruit I keep circling without ever bringing home.
