Glossier You

Glossier came out of Emily Weiss's beauty blog Into The Gloss and launched as a brand in 2014, and by the time it released You in 2017 it had built a following large enough to make a first fragrance genuinely risky. The company did something unusual with it. Rather than a full pyramid, Glossier publishes four elements and stops: pink pepper on top, iris at the heart, and ambrette with ambrox at the base. The house states outright that the fragrance fuses with your skin's chemistry so it smells a little different on everyone, which is a bold thing to write on a product page and, in this case, largely true. The composition is commonly attributed to Frank Voelkl and Jérôme Epinette, neither of whom Glossier names on the page.

What it actually smells like is harder to pin down than most, and that is the design. The pink pepper opening is bright for about five minutes. Then the iris arrives, cool and rooty and slightly powdery, and it never becomes the cosmetic, lipstick-like iris of classical French perfumery. Ambrette gives a soft, seedy musk with a faint pear-skin quality, and ambrox provides a warm, dry, almost salty amber that sits very close to the skin. Glossier calls it a skin-scent-enhancing fragrance, and the description is accurate: on most people the result reads as a warm, clean, slightly spicy version of their own skin rather than a perfume worn on top of it.

It is an all-day, all-season fragrance and it is one of the few in this catalogue that genuinely suits both a summer Highveld afternoon and a cold morning, because it never projects far enough to become too much.

That is also the honest limitation. Four to six hours is typical, projection is minimal after the first thirty minutes, and people who want compliments at distance should look elsewhere. It is designed to be worn close and to be layered, and Glossier has since built a family around it, including You Reve, You Fleur, You Doux and a solid format, which are distinct compositions rather than concentrations of the original.