Gourmand Fragrances

Gourmand fragrances occupy a strange and rewarding position in perfumery. They smell of things that please us before we've thought about why — vanilla, caramel, honey, coffee, chocolate, tobacco, amaretto — materials that bypass analysis and go directly to pleasure. The category began in earnest with Thierry Mugler's Angel in 1992, which introduced the concept of a fragrance built around ethyl maltol and patchouli to smell unmistakably of something edible. What followed was a generation of sweet, dessert-like mainstream fragrances that gave gourmand a reputation for excess.

Niche perfumery has spent the last two decades doing something more interesting with these materials.

The gourmand fragrances in this collection are not sweet in any simple sense. They are complex, often dark, and built around the same edible materials used with genuine restraint and intelligence. Toskovat's Last Birthday Cake captures the precise and slightly melancholy smell of a birthday cake from childhood — not as novelty but as a serious exercise in olfactory memory. Toskovat's Amaretto in the Melting Room is warmer and stranger, liqueur-soaked and richly ambery. Both demonstrate David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi's particular gift: the ability to make the familiar completely unfamiliar.

Zoologist Bee, created by Cristiano Canali, is built around heliotrope and beeswax — materials that smell simultaneously of flowers, honey and something faintly powdery and old. It is one of the finest gourmand-adjacent fragrances of the last decade, regularly cited alongside the great classics of the category.

Etat Libre d'Orange approaches gourmand with characteristic provocation. Fat Electrician is built around vetiver and elemi — not obviously sweet materials — but a base of clean musk and a subtle caramelised quality makes it sit unmistakably in this family. Like This, created by Mathilde Bijaoui and inspired by a Tilda Swinton film, opens on pumpkin and ginger before settling into a warm woody sweetness. Both demonstrate that the best gourmand fragrances achieve their effect through suggestion rather than saturation.

Naomi Goodsir Or du Serail deserves particular attention. The Melbourne-born perfumer's tobacco and spice composition opens with davana, red berry and rum before settling into a deep, narcotic sweetness over cistus labdanum and amber. It is opulent without being obvious — gourmand perfumery at the level of fine jewellery, which is exactly the background from which Goodsir came.

For those new to the family, Les Indemodables Vanille Havane is the most approachable entry point: Cuban tobacco and Madagascan vanilla in a construction of genuine quality, rich and warm without being sweet in any challenging sense. Imaginary Authors A Whiff of Wafflecone approaches the same territory with more wit — precisely the smell its name suggests, done in a way that manages to be both funny and genuinely beautiful.

A note on wearing: gourmand fragrances reward restraint in application. These are concentrated and tenacious materials. One or two sprays is usually sufficient. The complexity reveals itself slowly over hours, and the drydown on most of these fragrances is where the real interest lies.

Samples are available for every fragrance in this collection. For a category this personal — and occasionally this divisive — sampling is particularly important. What smells irresistible on one person can read quite differently on another. The Fragrance Finder will also help you identify whether gourmand is the right family for your tastes, and suggest specific fragrances within it most likely to suit you.