What Is a Gourmand Perfume? The Sweet Scents Explained by the Person Who Blends Them
Gourmand is the fastest growing word in perfume right now, and most people who wear one could not tell you what it means. That is fine. It is a French word for a person who loves eating. A gourmand perfume is simply a scent that smells like something you could eat: vanilla, caramel, honey, warm spice, ripe fruit, chocolate, coffee.
I blend a few of them by hand in Moss Vale, so this is the plain version of what is going on in the bottle.
What makes a perfume gourmand
The line is simple. If the first thing you think of is food, it is a gourmand. A vanilla perfume is a gourmand. A honey perfume is a gourmand. A rose perfume is not, unless someone has poured sugar over the rose, and then it is.
Most gourmands sit on a warm base and a sweet middle. The best ones have something underneath the sugar so they do not turn into a lolly shop after an hour. Woods, a bit of spice, a salty musk, even a green note. That is the part people miss when they try to make one at home.
The bottle that started it
Perfume has always had sweet notes, but the gourmand as its own family really begins in 1992 with one blue star-shaped bottle from a French fashion house. It smelt of candy floss, chocolate and patchouli, it was nothing like the clean florals of the time, and it sold in silly numbers. Every sweet perfume since owes it something.
The material that gave it the candy floss is called ethyl maltol. I have a tub of it on the shelf. On its own it smells exactly like the fairground. A tiny amount is enough.
The three materials that make a gourmand
Vanillin. This is the main smell of vanilla. It was first made in a lab in the 1870s, and it has been in perfume ever since. Real vanilla beans are lovely and I use a vanilla absolute for depth, but vanillin is what makes a vanilla perfume smell like vanilla from across the room.
Ethyl maltol. The candy floss and toffee smell. It reads as burnt sugar, caramel and jam depending on what sits next to it. Very strong. You want a pinch, never a spoon.
Coumarin. This one smells of tonka bean, fresh hay and marzipan. It was the first synthetic material ever used in perfume, back in 1882, and it is what gives a gourmand its soft, warm, slightly nutty finish.
Add a fruit note on top and a wood or musk underneath and you have the skeleton of nearly every gourmand on the shelf.
Sweet, without being a dessert
The gourmands I make are built to be worn all day by an adult. The rule on my bench is sweet with something underneath it. Every one has a wood, a spice or a musk holding the sugar down so it wears like a perfume, not a candle.
They also come in an alcohol free spray, which matters here. Sugar notes can go sharp in alcohol for the first few minutes. Without it they sit soft and close to the skin from the first spray.
The Stuga gourmands
Vanilla No. 313 is the one to start with. Passionfruit and orange zest on top, vanilla bean underneath. It is the best selling sweet scent on the stall and the one people come back for.
Honey No. 325 is acacia honey, white peach and jasmine. It is the softer, more floral gourmand, and the one I hand people who say they do not like sweet perfume.