5+1 christmas inspired perfume

Christmas is just around the corner, so here is a small selection of 5+1 fragrances that feel right for the season. Scents shaped by holiday light, memory, and the strange combination of calm and chaos December brings.

It’s my personal pleasure that two of them come from my favorite perfumers, Jean-Claude Ellena and Thierry Wasser.

1. serge lutens - fille en aiguilles

Notes: pine needles, balsam fir, incense, dried fruits, spices, vetiver, bay leaf
Perfumer: Christopher Sheldrake

On the holiest night of the year, people move quietly toward a small church together for midnight mass. The crispy snow crunches under their boots in the dark. Tall, snow-covered, resinous pine branches brush their shoulders as they pass, carrying the deep scent of winter wood.

The light ahead feels ancient and sacral, something older than memory. Something that was always here with us. Incense already drifts through the cold air.

The sense of arrival that waits for you, and the reverent faith that comes with it.

2. hermès - hermessence ambre narguilé

Notes: caramel, vanilla, tonka bean, benzoin, tobacco, labdanum, coumarin, sesame, musk, white orchid
Perfumer: Jean-Claude Ellena

Caramel and tonka drift softly, like stepping into peace, that meets you before you even cross the doorstep. There are familiar faces, now with more wrinkles and grey hairs, familiar routines and dynamics that never change. And also the hard-to-swallow truth that some things do change.

Someone won’t be home this year. Someone coming home from far away. Someone isn’t there anymore, and you still feel the space they left behind.

A gentle homecoming, wrapped in gold. Something you understand without needing any explanation.

3. histoires de parfums – 1899 hemingway

Notes: juniper, black pepper, bergamot, cinnamon, iris, orange blossom, vanilla, amber, vetiver
Perfumer: Gerald Ghislain

Juniper and bright citrus open like the first sip of a G&T poured before dinner. Spices drift upward as the room slowly fills, conversations layering over each other.

It carries the personality of the man it’s named after, someone who believed that to understand Christmas, you need the memory of home. And someone dramatic enough to write:

”If my Valentine you won't be, I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree”

A scent for the in-between moment, when the night hasn’t revealed its direction yet. Anything can happen.

4. panettone – milano fragranze

Notes: ginger, mandarin, carrot seed, davana, rum, immortelle, marigold, vanilla, buckwheat
Perfumer: Mathilde Bijaoui

During the holiday season, sweetness has no limits. Here it glows, never heavy.

Ginger and mandarin rise like the first cut into a fresh panettone, the kitchen full of joy and festive light. A gourmand perfume that feels like a tribute to the Italian family ritual, just like their most anticipated holiday dessert.

A simple act that gathers everyone for a moment. Soft, kind and sharing: a small sweetness that ties families closer together.

5. etat libre d’orange - noel au balcon

Notes: honey, apricot, mandarin, cinnamon, orange blossom, chili pepper, caraway, labdanum, patchouli, musk
Perfumer: Antoine Maisondieu

Inside, everything is too warm, too bright, too close, crowded. Overstimulating. Someone steps outside to get some fresh air, letting the cold evening settle the noise.

Mandarin and cinnamon linger around them, the sweetness of homemade pastry mixing with exhaustion, irritation, and that familiar holiday anxiety.

Not everyone’s Christmas is gentle. Sometimes it’s arguments waiting under the tree, questions you don’t want to answer, expectations you never signed up for, love that comes with pressure. This scent understands the weight of it and accepts you without judgment.

5+1. guerlain - baiser de russie

Notes: pine needles, absinthe, plum, lemon, cranberry, jasmine, vanilla, tonka bean, musk, sandalwood
Perfumer: Thierry Wasser

Long forgotten, dreamlike flashes from a performance. Its beauty is timeless and preserved in ice.

A winter scene held in silence. Distant yet close enough to bring tears to your eyes. It will always be beautiful. Just like this video.

how does our nose remember?

I’ve always been amazed by how strongly scents stay with us… since forever.

Sometimes a scent hits me and suddenly I’m eating breakfast before school, drinking my morning kakaó with the light shining through the kitchen window. I even remember exactly that High by Lighthouse Family is playing on the radio in the background.

Or I smell my first-ever perfume: Lacoste Pour Homme and I’m 14 again.

It’s 2003 and we’re going to watch Matrix Revolutions, but before the cinema my parents took me to a perfume store and bought me my very first fragrance. The birthday feeling, eating at Pizza Hut, the movies, and 30 ml of millennial nostalgia in a bottle.

I think that was my accidental introduction to the perfume world. What I didn’t know back then is that there’s a biological reason behind all of this. Smell is the only sense that goes straight into the limbic system, the part of the brain that handles emotion, motivation, instinct and memory. Every other sense takes the longer, more logical route: passing first through the thalamus, where the brain processes and “filters” information before it becomes conscious.

But olfaction is when we feel first and think second.

That’s why scents shift our mood instantly, calm or disturb us without explanation, trigger physical reactions (hello instant aura migraine with nausea from Paco Rabanne - One Million and half the synthetic oudy Hombre Nomade clones out there), and influence our decisions long before we’re aware of it.

As Hungarian perfumer Zsolt Zólyomi says:

“a good perfume is a dangerous weapon: the last layer on your skin when everything else is gone, and something that quietly shapes how others see you.”

All of this happens before the brain even tries to analyse what we’re smelling. And then comes memory.

Smell connects to the hippocampus so directly that a scent doesn’t just remind you, it replays the emotional state you had the first time you encountered it. Someone’s coat in a hug, the pines around Christmas time, the smell of rain on concrete, after a super warm summer day. Even they’re simple, they stay deep inside. Not because they’re dramatic, but because your nervous system treated them like emotional events.

For me, this explains a lot about how I experience perfume. Why I read about notes and ingredients when I can’t sleep at night. Why I go back to try perfumes again and again before buying them. Why my intuition (or what feels like intuition or my limbic system) often works better than any review or marketing. And maybe why blind buys turn out right more often than they should.

When I choose a perfume, I’m not choosing a bottle or a brand. I’m choosing a potential emotional state. A small, quiet shift in atmosphere. A story or a memory I haven’t lived yet or the version of me I lived that moment and maybe I already forgot. The body seems to recognise that long before the mind does.

That’s the quiet magic of scent.

It remembers you, even when you don’t remember yourself.