perfume write-ups: guerlain
some les légendaires + some others
Here is how I understand the perfume market, in pop girl terms.
Designer perfumes are like your main pop girls. Your Beyonces, Gagas, Madonnas, and so on. Here we have Chanel, Dior, Mugler, Prada.
Indie perfumes are, well, indie. They are run by a small team—often just one person, who is usually the perfumer, the distributor, the marketer, and so on. Here we have brands like DSH, Cirrus, Odette, and Solstice Scents. There are not really 100% DIY indie pop girls in this sense, as far as I know—so we’ll put down… uh… Ethel Cain, who is like 98% DIY and sort of unwillingly a pop girl.
In between, you have niche perfumes, which are the “indie / alt” darlings who may or may not actually be signed to major record labels… because “indie” is now a vibe more than a material reality. In pop terms, this is Lana, Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Charli, or Florence Welch. In perfume terms, this is Frederic Malle, Le Labo, Diptyque.1 “Niche” also means that the brand makes perfume and not other kinds of luxury goods (like handbags).
There are also celebrity perfumes, “cheapies,” dupes, whatever—these are more like Pink in that they are actually crazy popular but not going to be discussed much. (Though it may be that they’re discussed on video platforms… I don’t really hang out enough on TikTok.)
So if you look up “is Guerlain niche or designer,” you will get a lot of people who are sort of like… “both and neither.” Guerlain isn’t a fashion brand, like Chanel or Dior. (It makes cosmetics, yes, but… Le Labo makes candles!) It’s one of the oldest perfume houses in the world. It’s also not niche in terms of the vibe. It makes beloved, iconic, and influential perfumes. Guerlain is just Guerlain.2
Using Surrender to Chance, I got samples of most of Guerlain’s “Les Légendaires” collection in various concentrations. These are the house’s big classics—including “Jicky,” which is (I think) the oldest continuously made perfume, having been on the market since 1889. People who love vintage perfume seem to be pretty happy with the job Guerlain, under the direction of Thierry Wasser, has done over the past few years in keeping the new versions of their old perfumes smelling like their past selves, while still accommodating modern regulations. I did get one small sample of one vintage Guerlain perfume (“Mitsouko”) for the sake of comparison. I also got a couple samples that are not in the Les Légendaires line.
Because using the Guerlain website to extract usable lists of notes is impossible, I have used the descriptions from Surrender to Chance. I also linked their store instead of Guerlain’s because in a few places I could not find what I looking for on the Guerlain store. I’ve placed a few orders with STC now and have had nothing but great experiences with them—so if you live in a place where they ship, I recommend them for getting decants of scents that might be otherwise annoying to try.
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