August is peak perfume-switching season. The temperatures are still high, but after months of reaching for the same citrusy colognes and lightweight florals, we’re ready for something with a little more personality. This is when juicy fruit, creamy gourmands, green herbs and salty skin scents all start to make sense – particularly when evenings stretch on and there’s actually somewhere to go.

This summer’s new launches are covering all bases, from candied apple and pistachio to jasmine, sea salt and smoky woods. We’ve rounded up the brand new fragrances we absolutely love and are fairly certain you will too, whether you want something fresh and easy for the daytime, a deliciously indulgent gourmand or a darker, layered scent to take you from late-summer dinners into the evening.

Sweet/Gourmand

Carolina Herrera Peccato Nobile

Peccato Nobile is the first gourmand fragrance in Carolina Herrera’s Herrera Confidential collection, created by perfumer Ane Ayo. More importantly, it has an actual story: it was inspired by a pistachio-and-chocolate dessert Carolina Herrera enjoyed during long dinners with friends at a small trattoria in New York’s Little Italy.

Forget everything you think you know about gourmand fragrances. Carolina Herrera’s Peccato Nobile is adding a new luxe label to typically cloying, sickly sweet scents. It opens with cinnamon, pink pepper and orange – a warm, spicy introduction that cuts through the creamy sweetness of pistachio and cocoa. The effect is less “packaged sugar bomb” and more like a delicately layered pistachio pastry from a classic Parisian bakery: one you’d happily pay good money for.

It dries down with the notes of patchouli, vanilla and oud for some warmth and depth. It’s undeniably and confidently rich, but so sophisticated and elegant it will claim any woman’s heart. Perfect for summer evenings or special events – this is a feel-good perfume with a sense of occasion.

• Top: Cinnamon, pink pepper, orange
• Heart: Pistachio, cocoa
• Base: Patchouli, vanilla, oud

Price: £235 (100ml)

Maison Margiela Replica Lost Eden Eau De Parfum

Maison Margiela’s Replica line is all about nostalgia – a beach towel, a laundromat, someone else’s fireplace. It’s the olfactory equivalent of scrolling through a stranger’s holiday photos and somehow feeling homesick for a place you’ve never been. With Lost Eden, oppositely, there’s memory to borrow but the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.

It opens with candied red apple, and we mean candied – this isn’t a crisp bite of Granny Smith, it’s the sticky, glossy toffee-apple you’d get at a funfair, the kind that costs £6 and ruins your dental work. Vanilla to warmer and soften it, and oud, turning up to add the mystical temptation to what was, until this far, a very dessert-forward perfume.

The apple is sweet, the vanilla is creamy and the oud is smoky, and somehow the three make sense together. There’s something slightly mischievous about it, too – the whole point is temptation, after all – so this is not the perfume we’d reach for when we’re trying to smell clean and understated. It’s for when you want your fragrance to be noticed, and preferably followed by the question, what are you wearing?

Notes:

• Top: Candied red apple
• Heart: Vanilla
• Base: Smoky oud

Price: £165.00 (100ml)

Estée Lauder Glimmer

There is more riding on Glimmer than its glittery name suggests. For a house as deeply embedded in beauty as Estée Lauder, fragrance has always been part of the inheritance: Beautiful, Pleasures and, further back, the grander perfumes that helped establish the brand as a fixture on the dressing table. Launched this summer with Hailee Steinfeld as its face, Glimmer is Estée Lauder’s new prestige fragrance for a younger generation. It is also an unusually high-profile collaboration between three heavyweight perfumers—Dominique Ropion, Anne Flipo and Jean-Marc Chaillan.

The perfume itself goes straight for the current appetite for edible, enveloping fragrance. The raspberry has a soft, almost whipped quality at first, while the mandarin keeps the opening bright. Rose and vanilla give it that creamy, patisserie-like middle, although the patchouli becomes increasingly apparent as it settles.

This is the sort of perfume that makes us want to keep smelling our wrist. The raspberry is gorgeous – juicy and velvety, with that faintly tart edge – and the rose gives it a soft, romantic quality.

• Top: Raspberry mousse, orange flower, mandarin oil
• Heart: Macaron rose, vanilla bean, cashmeran
• Base: Shimmering patchouli, amber essence, sandalwood, tonka bean

Price: £125 (100ml)

Mugler Starlicious Berry Licorice

Mugler has always had a weakness for the theatrical side of fragrance. Angel changed the rules for gourmand perfumery in the 1990s, and the brand has spent decades returning to that appetite for big, edible, slightly surreal scents. Starlicious Berry Licorice belongs to a newer, much more playful corner of the Mugler universe: the Starlicious collection, a series of mocktail-inspired fragrances designed to be mixed and matched.

The opening is all glossy red fruit. Strawberry and raspberry arrive bright and juicy, then the liquorice starts to creep in, bringing a darker, almost chewy quality to the sweetness. Freesia keeps the whole scent lifted and floral, so there is a lovely push and pull between the bright fruit and that distinctive black-liquorice note. It is a simple formula, but Mugler knows how to make simple ingredients feel a little larger than life. This is a nostalgic one that makes us smile.

• Top: Strawberry and raspberry accords
• Heart: Freesia accord
• Base: Liquorice accord

Price: £50 (75ml)

Fresh/green

Escentric Molecules Clary Sage

Escentric Molecules has spent almost two decades challenging the conventional idea of what a perfume needs to be. Molecule 01 famously reduced fragrance to a single aroma molecule, Iso E Super, and built a cult following around its peculiar ability to seem to appear and disappear on the skin. Molecule 01 + Clary Sage, launched this summer, adds French clary sage oil and absolute to that familiar woody molecule.

Created by founder and perfumer Geza Schön, it brings a cool, herbal freshness at the beginning before the warm, velvety Iso E Super starts to wrap around it. There is a fleeting impression of crushed herbs and elderflower, then the fragrance settles into the soft cedar-like warmth that Molecule 01 devotees will recognise.

It feels effortless yet not anonymous – and it has the ease of a favourite white shirt: clean and uncomplicated. We would wear it all day, any day. For anyone who finds conventional green fragrances too sharp or herbal, this is beautifully restrained.

• Main notes: Iso E Super, Clary Sage
• Scent profile: woody, aromatic, herbal, fresh, green

Price: £135

Farina Jasmin Méditerranée

Farina 1709 dates back to (gasp) 1709, when Johann Maria Farina created what became one of the great names in eau de cologne. Jasmin Méditerranée is part of the house’s newer Série Extrait de Cologne collection, which takes that historic Cologne tradition and gives it a more contemporary, concentrated treatment. The perfume was created by ninth-generation perfumer Louise Farina and is imagined as a late summer dinner in Calabria. 

That setting makes perfect sense once the perfume is on skin. It opens with bergamot, basil and tomato leaf – a wonderfully green combination that smells like the first few minutes of an evening outside, when the garden is still warm from the sun. Then the jasmine arrives, with both Grandiflorum and Sambac varieties giving it richness and lift. Fig sits shyly behind the flowers, while musk and amber leave a soft warmth on the skin.

This is an easy perfume to wear throughout summer – it has that lovely quality of making a very ordinary moment feel more beautiful.

Main note: Jasmine

Price: 180€ (100ml)

Nancy Meiland Lupin Meadow

Nancy Meiland is a female-founded independent perfume house built around botanical fragrances and landscapes, with each scent given its own very specific world. Lupin Meadow is one of the clearest examples: it is an aromatic perfume inspired by an English meadow in summer, with the house describing its inspiration in terms of grasses, wildflowers, insects and blue skies.

It smells green from the first spray, but there is much more going on than freshly cut grass. The citrus and black pepper give the opening a lovely fizz, followed by lavender and rosemary, while eucalyptus brings a cool, almost camphoraceous edge. The lupin accord softens those herbs and gives the middle a pretty blue-purple floral impression. This is the one we would choose for a country walk with very good shoes. It has a sense of wildness, but it is not rustic; there is something quite beautiful about the way the aromatic herbs sit against the softer lupin. It is a wonderfully mood-lifting perfume.

Top: Bergamot, mandarin, cardamom, black pepper

Heart: Lavender, rosemary, eucalyptus, amyris, papyrus, carrot oil, lupin accord

Base: Patchouli, moss

Price: £135 (50ml)

Jo Malone Sea Salt Bergamot Cologne

Jo Malone has gone back to the coast for its latest fragrance, but this time it’s the Celtic Sea rather than the familiar windswept shores of Wood Sage & Sea Salt. Sea Salt & Bergamot opens with bright bergamot before the sea-salt heart brings in that cool, mineral quality you get from being properly beside the water – not the coconut-and-sunscreen version of a beach holiday, but cold air, wet rocks and waves breaking against the shore.

The fragrance feels fresh, bright, wilder and more elemental, and there’s something alluring about that combination in summer: it has the immediate freshness you want in the warmer months while still keeping its character. If Wood Sage & Sea Salt feels like walking along a British beach, Sea Salt & Bergamot feels more like actually getting close enough to the water to feel the spray.

• Top note: Bergamot

• Heart Note: Sea salt
• Base Note: Driftwood

Price: £125 (100ml)

anatomē Expression

London-based brand builds its perfumes around botanicals, wellbeing and aromachology, with each fragrance assigned an emotional purpose. Expression is the oceanic scent in the collection, created around the feeling of being beside the Atlantic and intended to encourage a sense of clarity and calm. Its inspiration comes from coastal places including Comporta, Long Island, St Ives and Cap Ferret. 

It has that salty, green smell of the coast, but the woods stop it from becoming a straightforward marine fragrance. We particularly like how atmospheric this feels -almost wet – before the woods emerge and make it warmer. It has none of the suntan-lotion associations that often creep into summer perfumes. This feels like the coast on an overcast morning, when the rocks are dark and the sea air is cool enough to make you breathe more deeply.

• Top: Sea moss, sea salt, seaweed, clove
• Heart: Cedarwood, guaiacwood, patchouli
• Base: Oakmoss, treemoss, hinoki

Price: £125 (100ml)

Read more

From a post-it note to a five-star hotel: Building Soho’s most disruptive hair salon

Hot stuff: The 5 best heat protectant sprays for 2026

These foundations will give you the most beautiful, natural-looking coverage for the warmer months