Jo's Scent Notes: To The Fairest Cécile

Last year, in our Beauty Bible Awards, something extraordinary happened in the Body Oil category. A single brand – to the fairest – won three Awards, including the Gold Award and Best Natural Award, having massively impressed three different tester groups. It had never happened in all the days of Beauty Bible, and we were just so impressed.

The texture of those body oils wowed testers, but so, too, did the fragrances – and perhaps that’s not surprising, because to the fairest is, principally, a perfume house, founded by art historian and vintage clothing dealer Rebecca Rose in 2019. Rebecca was inspired by a converstion with fragrance expert Lizzie Ostrom (a.k.a. Odette Toilette and author of Perfume: A Century of Scents) to launch her own fragrance house.

That is a very brave thing for any woman to do – although Rebecca does have a most excellent collaborator, in the form of Penny Williams, a Creative Perfumer and fragrance expert who’s been making scents for over 30 years, and who I first met through her work for Floris.

Rebecca set out to offer fragrances which are modern, yet with a vintage spirit – a reflection of how many of us wear our pre-loved clothes, I’m guessing. We don’t want to smell like something off your granny’s dressing table (or look like something out of a 1920s photo, come to that). But at the same time, a nostalgic nod to beautiful scents of yesterday doesn’t go amiss, in a world in which so much perfume smells… like so much other perfume there. (Fruity florals, anyone?)

I reckon that if Cécile – which is my favourite of to the fairest’s scents – was a piece of clothing, I think it would be a wispy tea dress made of the finest chiffon. This is such a beautiful, feminine scent. At the first, it’s fresh – almost like a Cologne, briefly, with notes of bergamot and mandarin. But then its petals unfurl, giving wafts of dew-drenched rose. As skin slowly warms Cécile, the base notes drift in, giving an a sense of powderiness. Remember those old-fashioned swansdown or velvet puffs, on your grandma’s dressing table? This is like burying your nose in one of those, so floaty and almost ‘tickly’ is it, when you breathe it in. Technically, those notes in the perfume’s dry-down include amber and clove bud – but also, I reckon, there’s got to be a sprinkling of fairydust and a few sunbeams in there, too.

Now, I’d admired to the fairest, while I was at the helm of The Perfume Society – but it wasn’t until International Women’s Day, last year, at an event for Investec, that Rebecca and I got to meet in person, and I instantly became an even bigger fan. Women at this networking event were clustered around to the fairest’s little stand, and no wonder: hers are exquisite perfumes – and, of course, award-winning body oils – offering the little extra feel-good factor that you’re supporting a female founder, and a British start-up.

There is a ‘matching’ Cécile candle, as well as that exquisite, argan-powered Satin Body Oil. And I very much applaud the fact that to the fairest is priced way more accessibly than many ‘niche’ brands – £85 for 50ml, compared to the hundreds and hundreds that some perfume houses are chancing their arm at. And there’s a 2ml sample available for £5, so that you can try it on your own skin, which takes the risk factor away. (Thus it wouldn’t break the bank to have a sniff of the other sample sizes, while you’re at it: warm, spicy Ordre Cosmique; gardenia-centric Aubine (the Body Oil for which scooped our Gold Award, NB), and Élan Vital, which I find almost aromatherapeutically grounding, with its notes of vetiver, patchouli and oakmoss.

Last but not least, if you’re wondering about that name: ‘To the fairest’ is said to have been described on a golden apple from the garden of the Hespirides, a garden belonging to Hera, ‘queen of the gods’, in Greek mythology; the apple, so we’re told, ‘represented beauty, knowledge and power – qualities claimed by goddesses Athena, Hera and Aphrodite.’

How lovely is that? Almost as lovely as the scents that phrase inspired…

£85 for 50ml eau de parfum – buy here