By Bahar Etminan, Host Ageless Radiance Club Podcast
I wanted Elise Wilson on the show because she does what almost no one else in Australian beauty journalism does: she tells you what she actually wears, why, and what changed her mind about it. Think Bethany Frankel without the bite!
Elise has spent more than a decade interviewing perfumers, founder and getting trained by the brands, going home with a kit most of us would consider an indulgent lifetime collection. When she wrote about her favourite perfumes recently for the Daily Mail, the piece went viral.
The comments confirmed what TikTok already had. Perfume Tok currently sits at six billion views. People want to be let into the bottle drawer of creators, celebrities and brands they love. So I asked Elise to share her fragrance collection with me and to let me in on her rituals around scent.
Stop spraying perfume on your neck. Here is what to do instead.
Elise interviewed a skincare specialist not long ago who told her something most fragrance lovers do not want to hear. His clinic sees a steady stream of women in their forties and fifties with the same complaint: a band of pigmentation across the neck and chest, deepening year on year, and the cause, in case after case, is not sun damage in the way they assume. It’s decades of spraying fragrance directly onto skin that then goes out into the light.
The mechanism is well-documented in dermatology. Many fragrance ingredients, particularly the bergamot-family citrus oils, contain natural furocoumarins that become photoreactive when exposed to UV light, producing the band of hyperpigmentation across the décolleté and neck that dermatologists now refer to as a perfume tattoo.
Elise has changed how she applies perfume since and recommends this to her followers. Roll-on fragrance oils behind the ears, a spritz onto the back of a ponytail so the scent moves when she does and a little mist onto the collar of whatever she is wearing so the fragrance wears down through the day on fabric instead of skin. A whisper on the traditional pulse points. This new ritual leads to less, overall, than she used to use. I hadn’t heard this anywhere else and I have been quietly redoing my own application ever since.
A perfume for every job your week asks of you
Elise has a perfume for every role she plays through her week. There is a work fragrance and a date-night fragrance, which most committed wearers will recognise, and there’s also a gym fragrance, which many will not. It’s a Versace she could not find an occasion for, kept in rotation anyway, and eventually assigned to her workouts. It’s now her neurological cue to get dressed, get out the door and to get in the zone of working out. The bottle and the workout are inseparable.
“Fragrance is the very last step before I walk out the door. It is my invisible shield. And if someone in the street stops me to compliment it, I am like, yes. I am out and about. I am a different version of me.” – Elise Wilson
Hers is the fragrance wardrobe concept in its most practical form, and Elise is one of the women I trust most to articulate why it works. The Versace is not a workout perfume because Versace makes a workout perfume. It is a workout perfume because Elise decided it was and her brain accepted the assignment. The scent is now the most reliable cue she has to switch into workout mode on a day she does not feel like it. Functional neuroscience in action.
The bottles in heavy rotation right now
The two she keeps coming back to are Burberry Goddess and Jo Malone Red Hibiscus Cologne Intense. She owns three Goddess bottles. One at work, two in her kit, because she will not risk running out, and she gets stopped for it on the street. Even her editor walks over to her desk to spray it.
The Jo Malone is the curveball because she didn’t love it at first sniff. She fell in love with the bottle, then with the toffee depth that runs underneath the hibiscus, then with the fact that it is the perfume her partner singles out from her rotation. Out of all the ones I spray on, he says, the Jo Malone is insane on you. This compliment has guaranteed it’s place in her ritual, and Elise has labelled it accordingly: Sexy perfume.
In the more occasional rotation, Lumira oils for when she wants the wear time of something dense and resinous, Viktor and Rolf Flowerbomb, which she will not let herself run out of because of how strongly it returns her to her early years in magazines in New Zealand, and in the cupboard, untouched for now, Jean Paul Gaultier Intense, of which she has about an inch left at the bottom of a 30ml bottle and which she rations because it has been discontinued and now goes for around five hundred dollars on eBay when it appears at all.
The Narciso Rodriguez trick a colleague’s boyfriend was gatekeeping
The single most practical layering tip in the conversation arrived almost incidentally. A colleague at a former job, who has no sense of smell herself, always somehow smelled incredible. She admitted eventually that her boyfriend had told her the trick. Layer Narciso Rodriguez Pure Musk over Narciso Rodriguez For Her Forever. The pure musk acts as the personal note and the For Her sits above it so the result is a more grounded, more compatible-with-skin version of For Her that lasts longer and feels distinctly hers.
I might do it the other way around. Musk first, the more composed fragrance over the top, because musk works best when it is closest to the skin and the pheromones it is meant to mingle with. Either way, the principle holds. The most effective layering is not two finished perfumes stacked. It is one base that customises everything above it to the wearer.
The bottle she can no longer open
Elise has two YSL Libre bottles in her cupboard, both still partly full and likely never to be worn again. Why? She drowned herself in the fragrance two and a half years ago, even bought two of her best friends bottles of it so they could all smell the same. Wore it through a relationship that ended badly and she hasn’t been able to reopen either bottle since. We likely all have that one fragrance that triggers us, mine is Tom Ford Ombre Leather.
“It transports me back instantly. It makes me think about that person, and I am not willing myself to. It takes me back to a really sad time. So it has to take a back seat for now.” – Elise Wilson
This is the dark side of scent conditioning, and the reason so many women keep ex-boyfriend bottles in the back of a drawer rather than throw them out. The neural pathway is too efficient to override by force of will, and the fragrance has been wired to the relationship, so reopening the bottle reopens everything else.
Joy as a reason to spray
What stays with me from the conversation is how openly Elise treats fragrance as a private joy. She lights up describing the morning decision in front of her bottles. It is a real, intentional choice to step into an avatar and mood. Which one out of these three do I want to be today? The confidence is one reason she wears it. The shield is another. But the part she mentions last and seems to mean most is the simple pleasure of it. The five seconds at the dressing table that belong to her before the day takes the rest.
Everything else in her routine is for other people to see. The perfume is for her.
Listen to the full conversation with Elise Wilson on the Ageless Radiance Club podcast.
