How to Pick the Perfect Wedding Fragrance

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

When planning her September wedding on the Spanish island of Mallorca, Siobhan Reid already had a tall order on her hands. This wasn’t just a party, but a rare opportunity to bring her and her partner’s families together from across the globe—hers from Canada, his from Argentina—imbuing every small detail with a newfound existential weight. “Because of the cultural and societal importance that we place on weddings, every purchase is just charged with so much meaning,” says Reid, a Barcelona-based freelance journalist.

But even after countless hours searching out the right venue, the right food, the right dress, Reid was in need of one more accessory for her wedding ensemble: a perfume, picked out especially for the day. “I want to have this thing that when I smell it, it brings me back to that moment,” she says.

Reid and her partner sought to make their wedding reflect the natural beauty of the Mediterranean island—her fragrance choice was no exception. Un Jardin à Cythère by Hermès, a warm, sun-dappled woody scent, was a strong contender. Rosa Saltifolia by Maison Crivelli, a sea-salt-infused rose, also smelled like the perfect backdrop to the island nuptials.

But a trip back to the island a month ahead of the ceremony turned up the winner: Scent of History, an herbaceous cedar and oud scent by Mallorca-based perfumer Arquinesia.

“It really does bring me back to the first time I was in Mallorca, which then reminds me of the process of finding a venue with [my fiancé] Philippe and all the trips we did together, discovering the destination,” Reid says.

Brides are tasked with finding “the one” many times over—the dress, the shoes, the veil (not to mention the groom), with a seemingly endless amount of stuff foisted on them to buy in preparation for the big day. “You start to get targeted with Instagram ads. It’s like, ‘You need this, you need special Spanx specifically designed for your wedding dress,’” says Reid.

A perfume purchased expressly for a wedding is, on the one hand, another $100-plus sunk into the campaign to elevate this day above all others in your life (although perhaps pocket change in the grand scheme of things—in 2023, the average cost of a wedding in the United States reached $29,000).

But perfume is also a particularly potent element of a wedding. It’s a uniquely intimate accessory on an otherwise public day, appreciated only by the wearer and maybe their partner, rather than cameras and watchful family members. And because our olfactory bulb, the part of our brain that processes odor, has a direct path to the limbic system, our sense of smell is more connected to memory and emotion than any other sense.

“When you wear a scent, whether you realize it or not, you are tying yourself to a moment in time,” says Shabnam Tavakol, founder of perfume brand Kismet Olfactive. She uses memories as a basis for her creations, such as Wedding in Oaxaca, based on the smells of smoky mezcal and fresh flowers at a friend’s nuptials in the Mexican city. “People want to relive their special day over and over again. They can just easily do that [with fragrance]; they don’t have to pop the video in.”

That connection to memory means a single smell can stir up memories in a way no amount of perfectly staged wedding photos can—and with both the wedding and fragrance industries exploding post-Covid, perfume brands have responded accordingly.

Last November, Paris Hilton released her 29th fragrance, Love Rush, which she says was designed for her own nuptials; that same month, wedding gown retailer David’s Bridal launched its first fragrance line. This past spring, perfume brand Snif teamed up with influencer Emelia O’Toole, a.k.a. “Professor Perfume,” to launch Vow Factor, a fig-based scent created for her wedding. This summer, Kayali founder Mona Kattan launched Wedding Velvet Santal 35 and Wedding Silk Santal 36, a his-and-hers perfume duo she and her husband created for their own ceremony.

While pandemic lockdown has changed the way many think about both weddings and fragrance, that spate of releases does carry on a well-established tradition of fragrances marketed specifically for weddings.

“Looking back as far as 100 years, the ideas about buying wedding perfume have not changed much,” says Jessica Murphy, a museum professional who also frequently writes and lectures about the history and culture of fragrance.

With the rise of synthetic fragrance ingredients in the late 19th century, perfume became a mass-produced commercial product, says Murphy. At the same time, the American wedding industry commercialized many modern traditions—like lavish flowers, jewels, and photographs—through bridal magazines and advertisements.

Orange blossoms, a symbol of fertility, have been associated with Western brides since Queen Victoria adorned herself with them for her 1840 wedding, Murphy notes, and white floral scents like jasmine and orange blossom have been a popular wedding choice ever since. Advertisements for Houbigant Chantilly perfume, launched in 1941, featured veiled brides befitting the fragrance’s lacy namesake throughout the decades. When Vera Wang expanded to fragrances in 2002, she leaned on her success in the bridal gown industry with magazine campaigns centered around weddings. In 2013, Oscar de la Renta released Something Blue, a fragrance built around stephanotis, a popular wedding bouquet flower, with a bottle featuring a removable ring.

What’s changed to bring wedding fragrances into a larger spotlight is the evolution of fragrance marketing—from magazine ads and TV spots to a 24/7 social media cycle. You no longer need to be looking through bridal magazines to be influenced to buy a wedding perfume: When influencer Mikayla Nogueira told her 14.7 million TikTok followers she was looking for a fragrance for her summer wedding, countless creators and followers swooped in to offer their suggestions. (She eventually chose Chanel Chance Eau Fraîche.)

“A signature scent has been a very trendy phrase and something that I think so many people have been looking for, especially in the last few years,” says Emi Foster, marketing coordinator and sales associate for perfume retailer Luckyscent. “I feel like a wedding fragrance is a different version of that.”

Or rather, a more amped-up version. “Often people want something that they would normally like anyway, but that’s maybe a bit more special-occasion feeling,” adds Claire Jelinek, a fellow marketing coordinator and sales associate with Foster. “There’s a lot surrounding the wedding day in general, like everything has to be perfect. I think that does extend to fragrance as well.”

Kathryn Lee, a New York City–based lawyer, came across the idea of a wedding perfume while in the deep end of the online wedding sphere: “I was so in the weeds of wedding planning and looking at every Instagram page, magazine article.” She and her fiancé got married on the steps of the New York Public Library in 2020 before holding a wedding in Los Angeles with their friends and family in the summer of 2022. A perfume was a way to make the 100-plus-person event feel personal.

“Nobody else, even my husband included, probably remembers that I have a specific wedding scent,” says Lee, who purchased Chanel Chance Eau Tendre to wear on the day. “It’s just for me personally to have a scent that I can look back on and remember the memories.”

That personal touch stands in contrast to the pressure many couples face in making their weddings perfectly consumable for others through expertly curated photos. “There’s a huge emphasis on making sure it’s picture-perfect for social media,” says Lee of a wedding today. Today’s couples might hire not only a traditional wedding photographer, but social media content curators for the day as well. “Yes, photos last forever, but at the same time, are you doing this because it’s true to you or because you want to appear a certain way?”

When Caroline Charles got married in her hometown of Brisbane, Australia, in 2004, there was no Pinterest, no Say Yes to the Dress, and certainly no Instagram. As young students living in Cambridge, England, she and her fiancé were on a strict budget. But as a perfume lover, Charles felt that a wedding fragrance was a priority.

“You’re not going to wear your dress again. You’re not going to wear shoes again. But you can wear your scent again and then carry that with you,” says Charles, who now lives in the English town of Reading and works in university management.

She took multiple trips to London over their six-month engagement, smelling every perfume she could find. “It was an absolute mission,” she recalls. In her quest for an extravagant floral bouquet of a scent, she found Marc Jacobs by Marc Jacobs, a gardenia and tuberose concoction that set her back £55—a small fortune for her at the time. “I didn’t let myself even open it until our wedding day.”

Today’s brides have the advantage of countless online forums and channels to help them pick everything from a fragrance to centerpieces. But even as the wedding industry balloons, certain notions are particularly resilient. Advertisements for Estée Lauder’s heady floral perfume Beautiful, first launched in 1985, have centered on bridal themes since its inception. Campaigns have evolved to reflect the eras, with wedding gowns transitioning from late-’80s puff sleeves to sleek 2000s minimalism. But the tagline remains the same: “This is your moment to be beautiful.”

That sentiment is at once an opportunity and a source of pressure for brides.

“I’m very suspicious of the idea of the one greatest day of my life. And for me, that day was really part of a whole chapter,” says Jessica Murphy of her 2007 wedding. For the small ceremony at her high school chapel, she wore her mother’s dress and her grandmother’s favorite perfume, Bellodgia by Caron, a soft carnation and rose scent. “I was very happy wearing it that day, because it was something I loved that was already part of my life, the way my husband was already part of my life by that point.”

Even as many modern brides challenge the notion that a wedding is their one chance to feel special, the (presumed) singularity of the wedding day is a persistent part of its mystique. “It’s this kind of rite of passage,” says author Xochitl Gonzalez, who worked as a high-end wedding planner prior to publishing her debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming, in 2022. “Whether we like it or not, no matter how much feminism has evolved society, I still think there’s something about when a woman gets married, she’s suddenly grown up in the world.”

While grooms don’t face the same pressures to appear perfectly styled on their wedding, men’s grooming brand Hawthorne founder Brian Jeong believes fragrance offers an opportunity for more men to express themselves on their wedding day. “I think that we really are in an age of self-styling, and an age of self-expression,” says Jeong, who wore the Hawthorne perfume Canary Diamond to his Hawaii wedding last year. “I think [a wedding] is the perfect venue for that self expression.”

At the suggestion of a friend, writer and fundraiser for homeless initiatives Ari Murphy Bolotin and their partner, entertainment and brand marketing specialist Darice Murphy, decided to each purchase a perfume for their wedding in Los Angeles this summer. “As someone who identifies as genderqueer, and as someone who is not well versed in scent exploration, [fragrance] is often gendered or coded as a more feminine act,” Bolotin says. So many wedding traditions are built on heteronormative ideas of gender, but Bolotin and Murphy wanted their wedding to “feel and be as queer as possible”; they walked each other down the aisle, Murphy in a white gown and Bolotin in a custom white suit with a train. Bolotin ultimately chose the scent Une Amourette Roland Mouret, by Etat Libre d’Orange: “It actually enhanced my feeling of confidence in my gender and my body.”

For her perfume, Murphy chose Nishane’s A Hundred Silent Ways, a lush blend of tuberose and jasmine with facets of vanilla and blueberry; she and Bolotin carried their chosen scents into their honeymoon, and plan to wear them for special dates and anniversaries.

“When Darice mentioned hers as like blueberry, and started describing it, I immediately was transported to smelling her neck on the dance floor during our first dance,” Bolotin says.

A beloved fragrance is a unique time capsule of a special day. But it’s also nearly impossible to predict how your feelings about a scent—or your spouse—will evolve over the years. “I got a special fragrance for my wedding day—I can’t remember what it was,” says Gonzalez. “But I remember I went out and got a special fragrance when I got divorced.”

Caroline Charles’s perfume tastes have certainly evolved since she was 24. “At the time, I thought I would love Marc by Marc Jacobs forever,” she says with a laugh. Following her 2004 wedding, her preferences gravitated to more niche scents, like Ormonde Jayne’s rose and saffron Ta’if.

Other things have changed, too. Marc Jacobs discontinued the namesake fragrance as Daisy became the brand’s flagship perfume, and even the department store where she purchased the perfume, the former British stalwart Debenhams, has since gone out of business.

Still, Charles isn’t overly precious about saving the last remnants of the bottle she has left. While she no longer wears the Marc Jacobs scent out, she will occasion spray it on to tap into the memories it holds. “No set of chemicals is going to last forever, and I would rather use it up than go to spray it one day and find that it’s gone off,” she says.

And with her feelings about her marriage as happy as ever, the perfume, nearly 20 years later, still works its magic. “Now that it’s been so long, I see the photos and I just think, Goodness me, we were young,” Charles says. “Whereas in a way, when I smell the perfume, it brings the past right back, and I feel like I’m there right now.”

Miss Dior Eau de Parfum

“I wore a bottle of Miss Dior that had been engraved with my name on it for my wedding day. I have always loved this beautiful scent—the floral bouquet is so classic, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, so I know I’ll be able to relive the magic of that day for years to come.” —Jenna Rosenstein, beauty director

Peony & Blush Suede Cologne

Sofia Richie Grainge wore a blend of two Jo Malone scents on her wedding day, which took TikTok by storm earlier this year. This was the first.

English Pear & Freesia Cologne

Richie Grainge blended her Peony & Blush Suede cologne with this one to create a fragrance that was unique to her.

Fleurissimo Eau de Parfum

Fleurissimo was commissioned by Prince Rainier of Monaco as a gift for Grace Kelly on their wedding day.

L’Interdit Eau de Parfum

This is a modern take on the fragrance Hubert de Givenchy created for Audrey Hepburn, with classic notes of orange blossom, jasmine, and patchouli.

You Might Also Like

• 4 Investment-Worthy Skincare Finds From Sephora

• The 17 Best Retinol Creams Worth Adding to Your Skin Care Routine