I've Polled Every Editor I Know—This Is 2025’s Most Complimented Perfume

Being a beauty director who is famed for not mincing her words, I'm going to come right out and say that Amouage Guidance is about to knock every other "buzzy" and "viral" perfume off their pedestals. And before you zone out on me, I want to say that I get it—it's hard to keep up with the latest "it" perfumes. I'm a journalist trained in the art of unbiased reporting who writes about the best perfumes for a living, and even I'm guilty of changing my mind on the topic. But hear me when I tell you, Amouage Guidance will be the defining and most popular scent of not just the year, but perhaps even the latter half of the decade.

And this is an outlandish thing to say for many reasons. The first being that this is no affordable perfume. In fact, a bottle of Guidance will set you back a cool £320. And the other reasons mainly centre around the fact that the choice of niche perfumes has never been vaster than it is right now—the fragrance industry is booming, and the concept of a signature scent is being tossed aside in favour of large fragrance wardrobes. And yet, despite the odds, in 2025, I've been witnessing something astonishing, something I haven't seen happen since 2021 when Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540 suddenly became the perfume on everyone's necks—another, even more luxurious, even more expensive, even more hard-to-come-by perfume is climbing its way up the cult-status ladder.

You see, a few weeks ago, when I asked a room full of beauty editors, directors, insiders and influencers what their most complimented perfume was, Amouage Guidance was the overwhelming response. And this didn't come as a surprise to me. Since its launch in 2023, Guidance has slowly been creeping its way into my everyday life. Sure, I have a bottle on my own shelf, but beyond that, I started seeing the perfume community talking about it (read: losing their minds over its beauty) on TikTok last year.

Soon after, I started spotting bottles of it sitting on the shelves of some of the chicest women I know on Instagram. And then, back in January of this year, I began noticing it in rooms. By March, a very in-the-know friend of mine who doesn't work in the beauty industry asked me about it. By May, I was catching the odd waft of it on London's streets. It's official: We're in our Amouage Guidance era. So what exactly is it that makes this perfume just so appealing?

For starters, let's talk about the back story of Amouage, as I think it helps to explain the general profile of Guidance a little. Amouage is a perfume house, founded back in the 1980s, by the Albusaidi family (the ruling dynasty of Oman) to be "the gift of kings". It takes the long-cherished art of Middle Eastern perfumery and creates fragrances that prove aspirational the world over. (It's worth knowing here that it is very rare for Western fragrance houses to crack the Middle Eastern market, and equally, for Middle Eastern houses to crack the Western market.) And Guidance is perhaps the brand's most excellent example of this Middle-East-meets-West fragrance fusion.

Straight off the bat, it's very important to know that Guidance is as punchy as you might expect a Middle Eastern fragrance to be. One or two sprays are all you need for a scent that will follow you around all day long. Another Middle Eastern art form that Guidance expertly showcases is that it possesses an incredibly complex blend. While French fragrance houses are currently busy trying to strip their WIP perfumes of notes to create the most simple of blends, Amouage is leaning into the artisanal craft of complex perfumery. And this is, in my opinion, what makes Guidance one of the most interestingly beautiful and most compliment-worthy perfumes out there right now.

But please do not be scared into thinking Guidance is all smoke, woods and spices—it's far from it. On first spray, you're hit in the face with an explosion of juicy and sweet pear, but before your brain has a chance to process it, your nose is tickled by an intense shot of pepper. This pepper might prove divisive for the first minute or so, but I urge you to stick with it. Within just a few moments, that juiciness starts to bubble back up, this time bringing with it a swirl of creamy florals. Hazelnut and vanilla begin to dance around the sharpness of the pepper, transforming it into something softer and more complex. There's a barely-there ribbon of smoke that tiptoes its way through thick, sweetened cream, garnished with shavings of nuts and saffron. Warmed, velvety petals of rose, jasmine and cistus float on the surface, while that initial fruity pear juice stays sparkling on the skin and warming with every second that passes.

I suppose you could say that Guidance is a floral perfume. But if it's a floral perfume, it's also a gourmand perfume. And if it's a gourmand perfume, it is also a woody perfume. And if it is a woody perfume, it is also a spicy perfume. And this train of confusion is what goes through the head of every person who has the pleasure of encountering Guidance—its complexity is blatantly impressive to even the most untrained of noses. It ignites a sense of wonder, awe and intrigue. It smells unashamedly expensive, and that's because it is. It is a scent that is, in my opinion, impossible to impersonate. And, whether you like it or not, the popularity of Guidance proves this je ne sais quois is something people are very much willing to pay for in 2025.

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