Anybody who knows me well or who has yapped with me about fragrance knows that, generally speaking, I tend to like ambery, musky and/or woody perfumes the best. That there is a very fine line between what I consider to be just the right hint of sweetness and too sweet. Citrus perfumes on other people? Beautiful! Citrus scents, laden with orange blossom, on my own skin… You’ll have to ask me in person how I’d describe them, but as this is a published piece of work, I’ll simply say that it doesn’t really work. And yet. Juliette Has A Gun’s Lust For Sun, with its orange blossom, bergamot, coconut and monoï, has me utterly hooked.
But that’s the beauty of perfumery. The best perfumes can be blended in such a way that a list of olfactory notes you might usually find offputting are so well-balanced and so beautifully blended that you fall hook, line and sinker when you actually smell the final fragrance. A reminder that as well as not judging a book by its cover, we also shouldn’t judge a fragrance purely by its description. To that end, if you love the sound of a radiant, not too sweet, slightly creamy, long-lasting solar perfume for summer, here’s why I urge you to spritz Lust For Sun if you happen to pass her by.
I first tried Lust For Sun at a preview of a consumer fragrance pop-up put on by Space NK. It was fun; you moved around the space and visited various stations, each dedicated to a single brand, with Juliette Has A Gun’s stand somewhere in the middle of the journey. Here, you discovered scents by playing coconut shy and “winning” an atomiser. I can’t remember the name of the first scent I “won”, just that the atomiser was blue and it wasn’t my vibe. The second, though? I immediately got that sensation of my brain lighting up, that love at first sniff. I thought, “I f***ing love that”. I hate to resort to an overused fragrance cliché, but there really is no better way of putting it than saying it’s a burst of hazy sunshine. Warm and glowy, there’s a hint of sweetness from the coconut without being obviously coconutty and reminiscent of a bottle of Malibu. Sun-soaked florals like freesia and orange blossom mingle with musks and ambroxan.
And so, off I went, obsessively sniffing my wrist for the rest of the day. It just smelled fantastic and, to be honest, I was almost incredulous that I both liked and suited such an obviously summery perfume. I test a lot of perfumes every month as part of my work as a beauty editor, but in the weeks after the event I went as far as spritzing the display bottle of Lust For Sun when passing through a department store beauty hall on more than one occasion. I don’t regret it.
Thankfully, I did then get my hands on the scent to apply at home rather than relying on brief encounters with in-store tester bottles, so I am happily wafting around smelling like warm, suncreamy skin this summer; its throw and sillage are so good that I feel like it’s radiating from my skin. Aside from the actual scent, the bottle also looks beautiful in a crowd of more muted and minimalistic designs, glowing like a deep amber and red sunset whenever light passes through its tinted glass.
(Image credit: Lucy Abbersteen)
While the scent itself is a big part of the equation, a fragrance’s longevity plays a huge role. There are some beautiful perfumes on the market that quite simply don’t hang around for longer than a couple of hours, max. Which is fine if it’s a cheaper perfume you can afford to repurchase often, but you’ll quickly burn through hundreds of pounds’ worth of fragrance if you want to keep it topped up. Thankfully, Lust For Sun lasts for hours. I can be caught in a breeze on a tube escalator and catch it wafting around hours after I left the house. Its longevity out performs some fragrances I’ve tested that cost twice—nearly three times—as much. I get home after a sweaty day of meetings, events and coffee shop writing sessions and I can still smell it. It also attracts compliments like nothing else.
So, there you have it. One of my go-to summer scents and the one I’m currently dousing myself in. I don’t care to gatekeep it because, quite frankly, I’d be happy if lots of people around me were wearing it, too. No fragrance can appeal to everyone, but I really think it’s a modern summer classic—it has managed to coax even me away from my usual cedarwood-heavy scents, after all. Go and smell Lust For Sun.