As a beauty editor, my vanity is constantly overflowing with glass bottles of carefully crafted fragrances as launch after launch ends up on my doorstep. At this point, it’s hard for me to detect what I love and what I’m keeping around just for the pretty packaging.
Following a recent listen to one of my favorite podcasts—The Broski Report, where comedian/celebrity interviewer Brittany Tomlinson (ahem, Broski) dove into a nearly 20-minute spiel about the perfumes that make her smell like a rich woman in a fancy hotel lobby—I knew I had to reset my palate with the help of this self-described fragrancehead. The most impressive part of this scent-inspired rant? She’s not just rattling off names because they smell good. From the understanding of accords to the art of layering, Tomlinson really knows what she’s talking about.
(Image credit: Raul Romo)
You may have once known her as “kombucha girl”—the expressive Southerner who amassed over 4.3 million likes on one singular TikTok circa 2019—but in the passing years, this social media starlet has blossomed into a media multi-hyphenate. Most recently, she added fragrance connoisseur to her stacked résumé. Though I sample hordes of new perfumes every week for a living, I found my preferences aligning with Tomlinson’s taste so seamlessly that I needed to pick her brain myself, and little did I know how much my credit card would suffer following her first-class recommendations.
“I think there’s something very luxurious about always smelling good,” Tomlinson tells me. “When I was working my horrible desk job making $39,000 a year, the one small item I’d gift myself was a new fragrance on my birthday every year. I used to save up for that Sephora trip.”
(Image credit: Brittany Tomlinson)
Though she grew up around women with good noses (family friends who gifted her with old, unused bottles of Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle and Burberry’s Brit and a mom devoted to Mugler’s Angel), Tomlinson has learned that her journey toward a signature scent is a work in progress. “I’m always changing, and so are my preferences. Fragrance is a great physical embodiment of that,” she muses.
