Rachel Syme on perfume, and why mainstream press finally got good at this.

For a long time, mainstream coverage of perfume was either advertorial or condescending — a glossy spread of new launches, or a 600-word "fashion piece" about a celebrity scent.

The last few years have been better. A small handful of writers at large publications have figured out how to take perfume seriously without taking themselves too seriously, and the result is some of the best fragrance journalism in print.

Two we send people to often:

Rachel Syme, The New Yorker

Syme writes about everything — manicures, pen pals, the Met Gala — but her perfume pieces at The New Yorker are the ones we keep linking. She's good at the thing perfume writing usually fails at: making a smell feel specific without hiding behind jargon. She'll write a thousand words about a single bottle and you'll come away thinking less about the bottle than about the kind of weather it's for.

The Dry Down

The Dry Down, Helena Fitzgerald & Rachel Syme's joint Substack, is more conversational. It's a newsletter, not criticism — they trade picks and disagreements like friends — but it does a thing that traditional reviewers rarely do, which is admit when a perfume changed their mind. That's a useful signal that almost never makes it into a star rating.

What ties them together

Both writers think about perfume the way good food writers think about food: as memory, as place, as a kind of slow technology for moving feeling around. That framing turns out to be much better at recommending something than the technical-note breakdown that dominates fragrance forums.

If you have a friend who doesn't get perfume yet but reads, this is what you send them. Then you tell them what their first three bottles should be.