Mixing vanilla into the cookie batter with your mom, laughing with your high school friends before a Saturday night out, walking along a beach as the weather turns crisp—a scent can bring back, viscerally, all the feelings that were wrapped up in life moments, big and small. Unlike our other senses, smell has a direct line to our brain’s emotion and memory centers.
Perfume is a powerful thing, as close to time travel as it gets. In fact, memories and scents are so interconnected that it’s widely believed there’s no such thing as a universally appealing smell. And whether or not you like a perfume goes far beyond its composition and sillage—it’s tangled up in your personal associations with its notes.
So we can only hope that you’ll find something to love in this year’s Allure Best of Beauty Scent winners, whether it’s salty sea air, crisp green tea, clean laundry, or cassette tapes that bring you a nostalgic kind of joy. When you find a perfume that’s you, it becomes a part of your story. It gets mixed in with your memories—and one day, a whiff of the familiar will remind someone of you.
Scroll to discover our 19 Allure Best of Beauty Scent winners.
Best of Beauty Awards 2026: Scent
Shop your favorite category or keep scrolling for the year’s favorite fragrances, body mists, and candles.
See our winners:
Best Floral Fragrance
Best Floral: D.S. & Durga Debaser In Bloom
Best Floral Fragrance
D.S. & Durga Debaser In Bloom
Former Best of Beauty editorial assistant Edward Horgan applies the D.S. & Durga Debaser In Bloom.
Edward Horgan
Why It Won: Record stores, mixtapes, ’80s rock and roll. D.S. & Durga Debaser In Bloom is an homage to pre-Spotify music culture with notes of plasticky-sweet cassette tape mellowed out by cream and coconut husk, mingling with gardenia. It’s a quirky-cool take on florals that’s sweetly warm and as thoughtfully curated as compilation tapes of yore.
