Coffee is one of the essential food groups, but it usually annoys me in perfume. I should *love* a coffee note the way that I love the smell and taste of coffee. I travel with an aeropress and acoutrements to avoid the horrors of hotel breakfast coffee, or, god forbid, the little paper tubes of instant.

But it’s a rare coffee-infused scent I can wear.

I keep trying to like Jardins d’Ecrivains’ George–and I love the dandy tweed-wearing, cigarillo-smoking, honeyed florals of it, oh, and the smooth myrrh–but that coffee just pisses me off. It’s like I’ve spilled it on my clothes and no amount of rinsing and dabbing in the bathroom is going to prevent it trailing around after me all day.

Gorilla Perfume’s Cardamom Coffee? Two of my favourite smells together, and I enjoy a quick scoosh in the room. But not on skin. Black Opium? Just no. No. Any sweetened gourmand coffee scent? I’m pulling faces like a toddler, holding my wrist as far away as I can, and reaching something to wipe it off. But then I’d do the same with flavoured and sweetened coffee drink.

Notable exceptions are Yohji Homme, where the coffee vanishes entirely into the background for me, and Zoologist Civet where the coffee is swirled deeply enough into the richness that I can’t object.

Any coffee scents you love? Something you think might win me over? Or should I just go and cheer myself up by rewatching Iggy Pop and Tom Waits in Jim Jarmusch’s sublime “Coffee and Cigarettes”?

originally posted 22 March 2019