Vanilla soft serve and candy corn: the best new summer-inspired fragrances | Canada Voices

A roundup of the latest seasonal scents, for wherever summer takes you.

A Beach Day

The first ever eau de parfum from popular skincare and makeup brand Summer Fridays is a summer resort scent in the tradition of Bobbi Brown’s Beach, Estée Lauder’s Bronze Goddess and Tom Ford’s Soleil Blanc. It’s the smell of eating ice cream on the beach at dusk after a day in the blinding, white-hot sun; the heady waft of thickly-applied coconut suntan lotion and drops of vanilla soft-serve dripping down your hands.

An Epic Blockbuster

The upscale deodorants and fragrances from London-based personal care brand To My Ships (the brainchild of a former Aesop executive) draw inspiration from ancient Homeric texts, each named for a fragment of his famed epic poem The Iliad. But instead of hubris and violence, the new Of the Gods scent delivers the earthy freshness of a leafy, herbal citrus with notes of petitgrain and polygonum (a flowering grass with a green, soapy and slightly peppery character) on woody patchouli. This crisply cool aromatic is just the thing for Christopher Nolan fans enjoying the filmmaker’s latest swords-and-sandals epic (and outlasts its running time).

A Dramatic Coastal Drive

DedCool led the wave of milky scents on PerfumeTok – a trend that continues unabated. This new aquatic variation in the brand’s cult-following Milk range has the same lactonic white musk notes that make the original a hit, but with the addition of hot-weather facets such as mineralic marine notes and wild lavender combined with a luminous solar amber that dries into a salty-sweet skin scent. It conjures a drive on Cape Breton Island, convertible top down, breeze off the rugged Atlantic, panoramic skies and shoulders warmed by the sun.

Harvest Time

If Luca Guadagnino’s sun-soaked Call Me By Your Name had a signature scent, it might be this elixir. Harvest Time opens with tart bigarade (bitter orange) and quenching honeydew melon before mellowing down to a soft, creamy peach. The photorealistic scent is an ode to the quintessential summer fruit, harvested at its juicy peak – so perfectly, succulently ripe it must be consumed standing over the sink.

A Night at the Fairground

This intriguing, unabashedly gourmand perfume evokes the nostalgic scent of an evening at the fair, after the last ferris wheel ride has been taken and all the children have gone home. It’s the stuff of warm donuts dusted in powdered sugar, flickering neon and candy corn, with an unexpected depth. After a dollop of pear, notes of butter, sesame and marshmallow heighten the tonka bean finish with a savoury, almost malty contrast. From an emerging niche French brand, the fragrance is sultry, languid and more memorable than winning a prize at the ring toss.