Three Best Vanilla Perfumes for Grown-ups

Vanilla is an essential component of many perfumes, particularly oriental perfumes and gourmands. Vanilla gives sweetness and creaminess and richness to perfumes, and often plays an important supporting role by providing balance against sharper and more bitter notes. Perfumes that focus more directly on the vanilla note, though, are too often both overly sweet and lacking in complexity and sophistication, and tend to appeal to teenaged girls.

Fortunately, they’re not all like that. Here are a few more sophisticated and interesting vanilla-focused scents that adults can both enjoy and wear in public – though they’re also a great perfume to wear to bed, particularly on cooler nights. There’s something very warm and comforting about a good vanilla scent, and they’re just the thing for a cosy night by the fire when it’s cold outside. These are happy-making, expertly crafted perfumes that are more than just guilty pleasures.

These three perfumes are all dominated by vanilla, but they’re also very distinctly different takes on it.

L'Artisan Parfumeur is a Paris-based niche perfume house founded by Jean Laporte in the late 1970s. It has a reputation for creating interesting, good quality perfumes, and Havana Vanille is definitely one of them

Havana Vanille (recently re-named Vanille Absolument, though you'll still find it listed as Havana Vanille in many places online) is part of L'Artisan's travel series and is (obviously) an homage to the city of Havana, Cuba. This is the richest of the three vanilla perfumes I'm looking at here, as well as the most distinctly gourmand. Notes include: rum, clove, dried fruits, narcissus, tonka bean, helichrysum, vanilla, smoked woods, moss and balsamic notes. The vanilla is paired in the opening with a strong boozy note – the rum – and this combination remains constant as the perfume develops. The spicy notes are also most obvious in the early stages. In time, the vanilla and rum are joined by a smooth tobacco note – definitely fresh tobacco rather than smoke – while the underlying woods and narcissus remain low key.

This is a really wonderful, sweet rich perfume for grown-ups. It’s the sort of perfume that you can enjoy sniffing for as long as it lasts on your skin – and that’s quite a few hours. If I was forced to choose a favorite vanilla perfume to take to a desert island, this is probably the one I'd choose. It's certainly the one that I wear most often.  

Serge Lutens is a niche perfume house based in Paris that has created some of the most interesting and individual perfumes available today. You can read more about Serge Lutens in my hub about some of his spicy perfumes.

Un Bois Vanille opens with a burst of vanilla combined with something slightly peppery and green that reminds me a little of celery or coriander. However, the peppery green fades quickly, and after that Un Bois Vanille develops into something that is very much not your typical vanilla fragrance. There's coconut in there, but also the spicy wood note that I've come to know in many other Serge Lutens perfumes. It’s not quite like any other vanilla perfume I’ve encountered – which is pretty much just what I’ve come to expect from Serge Lutens’ take on any perfume standard. A little while later, the liquorice starts to push its way to the front to join the vanilla and this combination remains central for the duration of the perfume.

Despite the pairing of the liquorice with the vanilla, this isn’t as overtly a gourmand fragrance as it might be. It’s much more interesting than many vanilla fragrances, but also just downright lovely and easier to wear than some others of Serge Lutens’ perfumes. Notes include: coconut milk, dark vanilla absolute, beeswax, caramelized benzoin, liquorice, marzipan, gaiac wood, tonka, and sandalwood. 

The iconic house of Dior doesn’t really need an introduction. You are probably also already aware that the equally iconic Poison was the fragrance that really made a name for Dior on the perfume side of things in the 1980s. Dior has produced four follow-ups to the original Poison (1985) – Tendre Poison (1994), Pure Poison (2004), Midnight Poison (2007) and the one I’m going to talk about here, 1998’s Hypnotic Poison.

Like the original Poison, Hypnotic Poison is classed as an oriental perfume, but the two perfumes are not much like each other at all. The original Poison possesses a dizzying array of notes but vanilla doesn’t feature prominently. Hypnotic Poison, on the other hand…

If L’Artisan’s Havana Vanille is all about vanilla and rum, and Serge Lutens’ Un Bois Vanille is all about vanilla and liquorice, Hypnotic Poison is all about vanilla and almond. At least, it is at first. It opens with sweet vanilla together with a contrasting bitter almond, a mix that grabs you, drags you in and doesn’t let go. As Hypnotic Poison develops it gets sweeter and creamier. Notes include: bitter almond, caraway, jasmine, moss, jacaranda wood, musk and, of course, vanilla. Some people get a cherry note from it; others describe it as more akin to root beer. I don’t get either of these notes from Hypnotic Poison, though I’ve looked for them more than once. What I do get is something sweet and rich and wonderful. It doesn’t last quite as long as Havana Vanille, and it’s more straightforward than Un Bois Vanille, but Hypnotic Poison is very easy to wear, and very easy to love.