What does summer smell like?

a perfume roundup for girlbloggers and mermaids, plus the best flowers popping off this week

My current summer altar, featuring a few of my favorite perfumes for the season

During the lockdown of 2020 (and yes, in NYC, we did have a pretty real lockdown), I stopped wearing perfume.

Perfume is part of my process for getting ready for the day. I pick the part of me I want to release when I leave the house, whether it’s a vintage princess or a garden maiden or a sexy New Yorker or whatever, and I select the fragrance that goes with that mood. And when I wasn’t getting dressed to leave the house, well, it felt useless to wear that kind of accessory. I was in no mood to create, just to exist.

But it seems like this summer is the sweetest, most carefree one since 2019. I’m finding joy in dressing up again, and the city feels back to its old self. My boyfriend and I are even going on our planned 2020 California road trip! Everything and nothing is normal again.

So my most expensive hobby has returned to my life, with an extra flavor of escapism. My favorite scents for this summer offer full-on girlhood vibes, like a passenger princess with her feet out the window. I hope you enjoy reading about them. Experiencing life, beauty, and memory through scent is a really cool thing.

What We Do Is Secret - Freckled and Beautiful:

I’m really picky when it comes to gourmand perfumes in the summer. Wear a fragrance that’s too syrupy or buttery on a hot day, and you risk feeling downright gross in the summer heat. But unsurprisingly, this Very Los Angeles brand (previously known as A Lab On Fire) nails a summery gourmand with so many of their fragrances.

Freckled and Beautiful is a skin scent made of milk. It’s ultra creamy and sweet, but lacks that ultra-rich, bread-y scent that many bakery fragrances have, so it feels clean and light. There’s just enough pastry here to make you feel like a creampuff, but enough orange blossom and neroli that no one will actually think you smell like one.

It’s also unabashedly youthful, not sexy. Think heart lockets, pink ribbon chokers, white tube socks, and those mesh ballet flats everyone on the LES is obsessed with right now. Spray it after barre class and head to rooftop sunset drinks with your friends.

Coqui Coqui - Coco Coco:

Although Coqui Coqui isn’t an LA brand, I first smelled this scent in a bougie Silverlake boutique—and stopped in my tracks. Coco Coco smells exactly like your skin after a day on the beach. Like, ex.act.ly. It’s ocean water dried to salt on warm skin that barely remembers the sunscreen from earlier in the day.

The green coconut note here is a real coconut note, not a lactonic suntan lotion scent, but the sunscreen vibe is still there, in the best way. To me, this is a mermaid-on-land scent. It’s what Ariel smelled like after she came up from the deep, her long hair tangled and her new baby-fresh legs drying in the noon sun.

Victoria’s Secret Pink - Warm and Cozy

Enjoying VS fragrances is an unpopular opinion that’s actually very popular. It’s not “cool” to like them, and yet! They’re predictable, simple, have no lasting power, and are almost always fruity florals even when they’re not supposed to be, but… so what? The fragrances are pretty inoffensive and sweet as hell, like a slightly (very slightly) more grown-up version of Juice Bar body sprays.

The version of this body mist I own is actually “Warm and Cozy Vacay,” a tropical-inspired flanker from 2019 that features strawberry instead of passionfruit, but the original has the same vibe: Snuggly vanilla with a tiny bit of musk, warm juicy fruits, and wafting spun sugar. Warm and Cozy is vacation evenings in a bottle, just-showered after a day in the sun, white hotel robes and a pink fruity drink with the AC on full blast.

Etat Libre d'Orange - (Don't Get Me Wrong Baby) Yes I Do

This scent used to be called “Don’t Get Me Wrong Baby (I Don’t Swallow)” which, I mean… lol, incredible. I don’t really know why they changed it—The brand certainly has other far more scandalous fragrances—but perhaps that’s why: The juice is much more innocent than its old name (and cringey old copy!) suggests.

Don’t Get Me Wrong Baby is a puff of airy white florals, dusted with musk and vintage aldehydes that bring to mind a starlet’s mid-century powder room without feeling old fashioned. Now, don’t get me wrong (baby), I’m not a big fan of aldehydes. You might know them as “old lady smell.”¹ But in this scent, the addition of an aldehydic note keeps the marshmallow notes from clinging sticky to your skin and turns the juice into a fresh little summer number. A young, modern Marilyn Monroe would wear this one.

Goest - Dauphine

On the other hand, Dauphine is made for a young, modern Marie Antoinette. I already waxed poetic about Dauphine on Instagram, but I can’t stop wearing it this summer so it has to be on this list.

I can only smell three things in this fragrance: sweet almond extract, airy rosewater, and the gentlest of musks. So transparent and ethereal, it’s hard to find where the scent ends and your own skin begins. And for a summer in New York City, full of weekend trips and happy hours and beach days and late nights waiting for the train, this is exactly the kind of simple, joyful fragrance you need.

what’s blooming today

It’s finally HOT in NYC, which is great because yaaayyyy summer, but also a bummer because I cannot spend every day at the Rockaways. I tend to stay out of the sun every year, protecting my tattoos and my ability to fool people into thinking I’m still in my 20s. But I’m trying to keep up my regular visits to the garden, and in that spirit, trying to embrace everything that makes summer special, even the bright sun and humid air. Every season is perfect.

The garden is fully embracing the current season too, as always. When the morning sun hits all that vibrant foliage, it releases strong scents of fresh mint, lemon balm, and sweet green leaf. The big fluffy blooms of spring are being replaced by strange puffy pods, tiny ground-covering blossoms, and thick, leathery blooms that happily stand up to the heat.

Here’s what’s happening this week in my lil square of Brooklyn:

The remnants of bright early summer blossoms,
Roses releasing their sweetest-smelling petals in the sun,
Birds bathing endlessly in the shady creek,
Bees and butterflies and insects on every single stamen,
Color condensing and turning up the saturation on the smallest petals and pods.

Can you find the three bumblebees in this gallery?

1. Aldehydes feature heavily in Chanel No. 5, and probably your grandma’s jewelry box, too.