A Case for Citrus Fragrances
- Bekah Waalkes
- Feb 26
- 9 min read
“There’s something earthy, a little bitter, behind the citrus, that makes it feel fresh and open; I feel like I’m outside in an orange grove, not sitting behind a desk.”
In the world of perfume, citrus fragrances can feel a little bit basic. They are simple and straightforward, palatable and accessible scents that run the risk of being a little boring: we all know what an orange smells like! Of course, there’s a wide range of citrus perfumes, from the classic chypre, with notes of bergamot, oakmoss, and labdanum, to the juicy and photorealistic, like Phlur’s Tangerine Boy or Atelier’s Clémentine California, perfumes I can only imagine on the wrists of absolute orange enthusiasts. Citrus notes can be clean and aldehydic, like the musky lemon of Santa Maria Novella’s Bizzarria or the sparkling yuzu opening of Strangers Parfumerie’s Yuzu Soda, or layered with white florals, like the delicate lilac of Jo Malone’s Orange Blossom or Imaginary Author’s Sundrunk, which smells exactly like drinking a generic brand orange soda under a tendril of honeysuckle. Citrus is easy to discern in a perfume but it’s almost always a top note, more of an opening act to a perfume than the real star of the show. That might be one reason people who really love perfume usually gravitate towards more long-lasting notes, the kind of scents you can’t always find in your kitchen: tobacco or tuberose, oud or weed, incense or iris.
I usually don’t reach for citrusy perfumes either, until this winter, when I began eating citrus more regularly, enticed by the promise of both seasonal eating and buying fruit on sale. At work, I’d peel a mandarin or two and luxuriate in the aroma lingering in my office. My snowy afternoons felt like they changed color, a little more golden than before. Mandarins are in season only briefly, in December and January, and if you think you don’t like them, I beg you to try one again during this window. The brightness of the mandarin, sweet and tart fruit, oily and slightly bitter peel, reminded me of other citrus scents that I used to love: a gray Ohio day of high school interrupted for a few glorious minutes by the decidedly powdery orange of a friend’s Clinique Happy sprayed by a locker in between class periods. The zesty sweetness (and tiny microplastic beads) of the pink grapefruit Bath and Body Works hand soap in my grandmother’s bathroom, always luxurious to use name-brand soap (from the mall!). Citrus notes can feel a little dated, a little reminiscent of Y2K and the aughts, a period dominated by fruity body sprays and pervasive citrus/white floral combinations like the so-sweet Viva la Juicy and powdery, musky Flowerbomb. I became obsessed with finding a perfume that could recreate the intensity of a mandarin, or grapefruit, or lemon.
Whether you gravitate towards it or not, citrus is ubiquitous in perfumes. “I don't think there are many perfumes out there with zero citrus in them,” says Alie Kiral, the brilliant mind behind Pearfat Parfum, a Chicago-based independent perfumery known for dreamy, surprising combinations of synthetic and natural. “All of my perfumes have at least one citrus note, but not always because it’s part of the story of the fragrance. Using citrus can help clarify or boost other notes,” she says. Kiral jokingly advises her students to add bergamot when they are crafting a fragrance that isn’t quite right yet: essential oil from the bitter yellow-green fruit can act like salt and pepper, helping to blend different notes into a whole. I think of Pearfat’s most popular perfume, the gourmand Bread & Roses, which has a subtle pomander accord, orange and clove, that lends a warmth to the more dominant notes of cocoa, yeasted bread, and rose.
But making citrus the star of a perfume is complicated. Citrus notes almost always live on the top of a perfume, most apparent in its opening, and rarely last very long. “That’s because citrus molecules are extremely volatile,” Kiral says. “When we smell something, we're actually taking it into our nose and processing it in our olfactory bulbs, and the molecules of citrus are very light. They're very diffuse and small. Compare that to something like a wood or an oud or a musk, which are heavier, larger molecules that stick in the receptors and your olfactory bulbs for longer.” There’s even more variation among citrus fruits themselves — lemon is more diffuse than green mandarin — and between processing methods and materials. Limetol, which Kiral uses to craft a lime cola accord in the arcade-inspired Multiball, is a synthetic compound also used to flavor candy. Lemon sfumatrice, which Kiral uses in her lemonade accord, is made by processing the entire lemon (peel, fruit, and seed), while most citrus essential oils are extracted from the peel only.
Lemon sfumatrice works beautifully in two of Pearfat’s perfumes that pair citrus and aquatic notes: 2030 Park Avenue and the summer seasonal Up North. Like all of Kiral’s perfumes for Pearfat, each unfolded almost nonlinearly through time, surprising me the more I wore them, sticking in my mind like a line from a Frank O’Hara poem. 2030 Park Avenue opens with a realistic but somehow warm petrichor accord, exactly like the beginning of a summer thunderstorm on sun-soaked pavement. The candied lemon is like the twist in your drink, a little bit boozy and sparkling, a sweet contrast to the mineral notes. I’m left with a dusty, warm floral that’s still rainy and fresh. It smells like walking home alone from the bar on a rainy summer night: you’ve just enjoyed time with your friends, you’re just the littlest bit buzzed, and the rest of your night is for you. You put your headphones on to play a song — the kind of song you only listen to when you are completely alone — and stroll home, enjoying every step, each moment full of possibility. I’m surprised by how much I reach for 2030 Park Avenue: I can imagine this wearing perfectly in the spring, but in the winter, it reminds me that soon enough things will be back in bloom.
A freshwater aquatic with a powerful lemonade accord, Up North reminds me of childhood summers in the Midwest — swimming in the blue expanse of my favorite body of water, Lake Michigan, but also in smaller lakes where grass grows right to the edge of the water, where you might find mud instead of sand. Imagine Sailing Day set on a pontoon on an inland lake. Up North opens with a blast of sparkling, synthetic lemon: where 2030 Park Avenue slides your French 75 across the bar, Up North hand delivers you a plastic cup of Country Time Lemonade, mixed in a big plastic pitcher with a wooden spoon. You walk barefoot across the grass to a well-worn picnic table, sipping slowly while you watch your cousins splashing at the edge of the lake. There’s something infectious and enthusiastic about Up North, a fizzy opening that fades into an earthy sort of freshwater funk that might only register as summery to those who go “Up North” and not “out East” or “down the Cape.” I’ve loved wearing Up North through the winter, when the mineral notes last on my sweaters for days at a time; when Kiral restocks this summer, I’ll be first in line for a full bottle.
“In perfumes that might be a little bit more abstract or interesting or weird,” Kiral says, “citrus notes are generally familiar and comforting.” I think of Byrdeo’s discontinued cannabis perfume Open Sky, which opens with juicy pomelo and the slightest crack of black pepper, a bright, airy opening that leads into the most green, unburnt cannabis note I’ve smelled in a perfume yet. Or Contradictions in ILK’s Libertine, a dark, woodsy perfume complemented by a surprisingly sweet and spicy citrus. The bitter orange and orange blossom layer tart and sweet, floral and fruity, in an almost euphoric opening, before it dries down into a lovely blend of rose and amber, reminiscent of Portrait of a Lady but with more leather. The result is a perfume that is fresh but dark and sexy: you’re drinking a negroni in a library lined with walnut shelves and leather chairs, reading Izumi Suzuki’s latest novel while the aroma of oily orange peel and herbal Campari diffuses around you into the dark room.
Many citrus perfumes feel bright and fresh, sometimes a little bit loud. I love Creed’s Virgin Island Water, which matches creamy, lactonic coconut with fresh lime, though I confess I can’t really imagine wearing it anywhere but the beach in summer. Diptyque’s underrated L’Eau des Hesperides is a green spicy citrus, more garden than beach, like Bohemian Lime but very herbal. The citrus top notes — I get a strong bitter orange here — mellow into a minty, grassy, woody smell punctuated with a sort of sweet immortelle. I’m underwhelmed by everything but the gorgeous bottle of Xerjoff’s Lira, a citrus gourmand dominated by a sweet lemon opening that fades into a sweet caramelly vanilla; if you want a more interesting gourmand, Kiral recommends Marissa Zappas’ Annabel’s Birthday Cake, which has a similar lemon cake accord and floral middle but opens with a latex note that reminds me of balloons and gives the whole perfume the sort of intricacy that I’ve come to expect from Zappas.
Personally, my favorite citrus perfumes embrace the innate sharpness of citrus: fragrant zest, acidic juice, bitter pith, oily peel. I’m taken with Xerjoff’s 1861 Renaissance, which opens with a strong cloud of citrus — I get lemon and tangerine — complemented by sharp mint. It’s intensely floral, pairing rose and lily of the valley, and a little herbal as it unfolds: it’s a bright perfume with a kind of polish and poise. I imagine 1861 Renaissance as a special occasion perfume for a practical woman with an edge: she throws excellent dinner parties with balanced menus (she even owns a wooden salad bowl!), but she secretly can’t wait for the part of the night when her friends drink enough wine to start arguing about ideas. I get a similarly delicious citrus bite in Jouissance Parfum’s En Plein Air, by far my favorite of their recent debut collection. A play between soft and sharp, En Plein Air is a citrus perfume for the clean girl with a dirty secret, for the woman slowly reading Annie Ernaux’s juiciest diaries outside over her lunch breaks. En Plein Air crackles open with sharp notes of lemon, an almost oily grapefruit peel, and bitter bergamot. The excitement eventually settles into a lovely, musky white floral with just the hint of the promised outdoor air, but the citrus lasts quite a while, much longer than many other perfumes I’ve tried. It’s an undeniably bright perfume with just a hint of musk that stays close to the skin: wear this to the office when you have secret plans after work that you’ll be daydreaming about all day. These days, my only after-work plans are my night classes in Italian, where I’ve received so many compliments while wearing En Plein Air that I’m coveting the beautiful full bottle.
I’ve ended my search for the perfect mandarin perfume, though, since trying Samar Perfumery’s Grove is in the Heart. It opens like the exact cloud of pungent, tart, almost oily citrus essence of mandarin that first transfixed me in my office, then settles into a honeyed linden blossom that feels sweeter than straight floral. There’s something earthy, a little bitter, behind the citrus, that makes it feel fresh and open; I feel like I’m outside in an orange grove, not sitting behind a desk. I find Grove to have incredible sillage — given the perfume’s coconut oil base, my roll-on performs more like a perfume oil, lasting all day.
I love how fragrance can transform the ordinary. A spray of perfume can change how you see yourself, make an outfit you’ve worn dozens of times seem new, and return you to a long-forgotten scent landscape from childhood. And citrus fragrances can seem so particularly ordinary, so regular and routine, even outside the world of perfume: there’s a lime wedge in your gin and tonic, Lemon Pledge in the cupboard for dusting, fresh orange juice in the fridge, a juicy grapefruit body spray with perfect 2000s minimalist design in your eBay cart. But what changes if you pay attention to the ingredients of that ordinariness? To the particular scent of gin-soaked lime? The limonone and terpenoids in Lemon Pledge? The difference between peeling a Satsuma mandarin indoors in January and eating a navel orange on a hike in June? In the end, all fragrance is an invitation to pay closer attention to sensory experience, a way of alchemizing the routine into the terrific, even in the deep blues and grays and browns of winter. 🌀
Bekah Waalkes is a writer, critic, and perfume enthusiast based in Boston. When she’s not stalking eBay for Italo Calvino first editions or vintage body spray, you can find her scrolling on Twitter and updating her online reading journal.