Gemma Dimond, the founder of The Glow Journal, said something to me on the podcast that I cannot stop turning over. We lost sexy for a while and maybe it’s because everyone is moving so quickly. But feeling sexy in yourself is about taking your time with things.
She is right, and the beauty industry has started to notice. We optimised the shower (hello everything shower), wee turned body care into a biohack between getting the kids off to school and winding down after a crazy day. We watched a whole genre of TikTok content emerge in which women race through eight-step routines as if applying moisturiser were a productivity exercise (guilty!). And in the process we stripped the sensuality out of one of the few daily rituals women still have to themselves. Gem is one of the people quietly rebuilding it, and the way she does it begins long before any perfume bottle is opened.
The candlelit shower ritual as the first step in any fragrance
Gem has turned showering into a sexy art form. A ritual of becoming. She turns the bathroom lights off and lights candles. She showers in the half-dark so the mood is sensual and the vibes are romantic. She picks her shower oil for how it will smell on her damp skin, layers a body oil over it, locks the oil in with a luxurious cream. This ritual turns her focus inward. The smell, the touch and the slow intentionality of it all have a spa and full sensory immersion quality I was so keen to try. By the time she gets to selecting a perfume, she has been thinking about her own scent for forty minutes.
“When you are working through your body care routine, you are so much more in tune with all of those senses. I treat it almost like a meditation. Like a body scan. Why am I doing this? What do I want to feel like today? Who am I doing this for? It should be yourself.” – Gem Dimond
The cultural significance of what Gem is describing is easy to miss because it sounds so ordinary. Run a shower. Light a candle. Choose a body oil with intent. The frame is what changes everything. She is making the case for treating the daily routine as a private act of self-attention rather than a checklist of products. This is so much for than self care. The fragrance she eventually sprays at the end is the loudest note in a chord that has been building for an hour.
I have written before about how the latest generation of hair care brands have begun to treat scent as a wellness layer rather than a finishing note, which sits alongside what Gem is describing.
Why the turbo-fragrance era is missing the point
The current taste for elixirs and parfums and extraits, the supercharged formats that project a metre and a half off the body, might have a strategic cost. It eliminates the intimacy fragrance is uniquely good at producing. Who needs to lean in if they’ve been blasted by a Beast Mode fragrance, a saccharine sweet perfume or heavy oud?
There is nothing seductive about being ensconced by a wall of scent. The invitation to lean in, to pick up a jumper that still holds the faint signature of the person who last wore it, to nuzzle into a neck and catch a scent that lives just beneath the skin, those are the moments fragrance has historically existed to enable. A turbo-fragrance overwrites them. It announces you to everyone in the room before anyone has earned the right to be close.
Gem prefers topping up through the day rather than spraying the cathedral-bell version of a fragrance once in the morning. The top-up ritual itself she describes as grounding. The equivalent of stepping outside the office for what we used to call a cheeky cigarette break, but using a perfume bottle instead. Inhale deeply and reset the day. There I am. I’m back.
Aura as a choice, not a personality
The word Gem kept coming back to in the conversation is magnetic, and magnetic is her signature as evidenced by her loyal following and reputataion in the beauty industry as a go to host, expert and influencer . It’s the word her husband used about her in their wedding vows and the word she has carried around as a personal compass ever since. She is honest about how it has reshaped her instinct for what kinds of energy she now seeks out, and what kinds she gives off.
In her twenties, she spent too much time, by her own account, in the orbit of the coldest people in any given room, on the unconscious assumption that defrosting them would prove something. She has since stopped doing that. The people she’s now drawn to read warm and inviting on first contact. Their aura announces them before they speak and she navigates this invisible field deftly. Gem finds herself reaching, in parallel, for fragrances that signal the same. Warm, resinous, the kind of opening that does not need to defend itself. A luminous aura that attracts.
“I love the idea of being a magnet to draw other people in. Because I know how beautiful that feels to be drawn in by someone else. Even if I am walking into a function where I do not know anyone, I want people to feel like, that is an aura I can come to, and she is going to make me feel good.”
Gem Dimond
Her signature scent of the last seven years is Le Labo Thé Noir 29. Smoky fig, a sexiness underneath that no one expects from a tea fragrance. She has gone through several bottles and is the perfume her husband, her family and her friends most consistently identify as her. For a woman that tries and reviews hundreds of perfumes for a living, this signature choice is telling. Even when travelling, when she has to limit what she takes, Thé Noir 29 always makes the cut.
The hairspray that anchors a whole childhood
Gem grew up performing. She did her first competition ballet bun at three years old, and at every concert through her childhood, the same pink can of Schwarzkopf Seidol hairspray came out of her mother’s bag in the wings and the scent of that hairspray is, to this day, a portal. She has not been in the Karralyka Theatre in Ringwood since she was twenty. She could walk in the stage door tomorrow and tell you, on the strength of one whiff, where every dressing room was. This is olfactory science and the power of scent on the limbic system.
This is the point Gem made about fragrance, almost in passing, that I keep coming back to. Once you understand how powerfully scent locks memory into the body, you can use the principle in reverse. A new fragrance, deliberately chosen, deliberately worn for a moment you want to keep, gets wired in. That is part of why her wedding fragrance was a perfume she had never worn before that day. Armani Privé Santal. She knew that whatever she chose would be wedding-day forever. She wanted that memory kept clean.
Sexy as a slow art
What runs through the whole conversation is the argument that the recovery of feminine self-possession does not require new products. It requires reclaimed time. The candle, the body oil, the half-hour before anyone else needs the bathroom. These are the actual ingredients to reclamation of self. The perfume is the last brushstroke on something that took an hour to paint.
Gem is what magnetic looks like in practice. Not just turning yourself up, but rather slowing yourself down until you become unmistakable.
Listen to the full conversation with Gem Dimond on the Ageless Radiance Club podcast.
