Eau Yes

No matter your taste or budget, there’s a perfect perfume for you. Use this guide to find your new scent soulmate.

- Rachel Syme

MORE THAN 2,000 NEW PERFUMES hit shelves in just the past year and to stay current, you’d have to update your fragrance as often as your phone’s OS. But we’ve made it easy, narrowing the field down to four essential categories: gender-neutral, indie, designer and cult. Read on for the most relevant and revolutionary scents of the season.

WHEN YOU WANT

GENDER NEUTRAL

IN 1994, perfumers Alberto Morillas and Harry Fremont made history when they formulated CK One for Calvin Klein, the first androgynous designer perfume. At the time, the scent, which smelled of sea kelp and freshly-squeezed lemonade, and came in a simple frosted-glass flask, became a bona fide phenomenon, speaking to the ennui of disaffected gen-Xers who wanted nothing to do with flashy, gendered marketing campaigns. Two decades later, the unisex-perfume craze is back, but with a different energy. Where CK One focused on minimalism, the new class is all about heady exploration, play, and identity. “I was a young perfumer when CK One came out,” says Parisian scent-maker Francis Kurkdjian, who recently released two fragrances in his namesake line, both named Gentle Fluidity and both designed to work with both male and female body chemistry. “[CK One] was not about gender at all. It was genderless. My new scents are about making your own choice.” Kurkdjian used the same 49 ingredients in both fragrances – spicy herbal notes such as nutmeg, coriander, musk, and juniper berry – but mixed them differently. “It’s about finding your way to what works for you,” he says.