Solar Fragrances Smell Like Summer and Sun-Kissed Skin—Here Are Our Favorites

As if mirroring recent seasons’ fashion trends, fragrance is turning romantic. This has made way for the next big thing, which is less about a note and more about energy. Enter, solar fragrances. These are designed to capture the feeling of the sun on bare skin. What’s more romantic and sexy than that?

Unlike recent perfume trends, like the jasmine renaissance, solar fragrances aren’t about one note in particular. Put simply, “a solar fragrance is the illusion of sunlight on skin,” perfumer Paul Guerlain tells Byrdie. In other words, to capture a solar fragrance, imagine distilling the vibe of warm summer sun on your skin into a bottle.

The moniker can, however, be deceiving. A solar fragrance’s notes may capture that sun-kissed illusion, but these perfumes usually live within the floral family of scents. They tend to blend “creamy white florals; lactonic notes, like coconut; and soft musks to create something that feels warm, luminous, sensual, and almost tactile,” adds Guerlain, the perfumer behind a swath of scents at luxury houses from Christian Louboutin to Rabanne and Valentino. This gentle, balanced characteristic is part of what makes them just right to wear in summer.

Of the abundant rolodex of perfume options, solar fragrances are ideal for the person who wants balance: something that’s not too herbaceous, not too gourmand, nor too floral. Ahead, we dive into the new era of solar fragrances, including revealing which notes bring the sun-on-skin feeling to life today. We also highlight the best eight solar fragrances to shop today.

Behind the Note

It’s not easy to transform the feeling of the sun kissing skin into a perfume. Creating a solar fragrance thus requires careful chemistry. 

“Solar fragrances are about radiance. They recreate the feeling of warmth on skin, sunlight in the air, heat rising off the body,” Brown Girl Jane founder Malaika Jones tells Byrdie. Though these sunny scents may often rely on florals with soft musks, they can also balance fruity and gourmand notes with the latter elements. These compositions, Jones adds, can be “built through notes like neroli, orange blossom, tiare, ylang ylang, coconut, citrus, musks, salt, and warm amber accords.”

Whichever components they’re made with, it’s the balance between both sides that’s most important for creating that sun-on-skin feeling. “It’s about precision in contrast,” Guerlain says. “You need enough brightness to keep it airy, but enough creamy warmth to feel close to the skin. If one side dominates, the magic disappears; either it becomes just fresh, or too heavy.” 

Guerlain is behind Christian Louboutin’s solar Oud Fétiche, which explores the harmony and tension between white peach and oud. For this one, “it was about opening a dense material into something more luminous and sensual without losing its depth,” he says, noting that this kind of balance is central to his work overall. (In technical terms, he adds, the perfect solar fragrance comes with using the right salicylates, the family of molecules that help give a fragrance a “diffusive, sun-warmed effect.")

Perhaps the most intoxicating part of solar fragrances is how they uniquely bloom on your skin. “On one person, a solar fragrance may pull airy and salty. On another, it becomes creamy, glowing, almost molten,” Jones explains. “That’s what makes them so compelling to wear. They feel alive on skin.”

“Heat, humidity, and individual skin chemistry can amplify the creamy or musky facets differently,” the Oud Fétiche perfumer adds, explaining how the chemistry changes based on each person’s individual skin. “That’s why they often feel like an extension of you, a sun-kissed version of your own scent, rather than something sitting on top of the skin.”

The Modern Trend

Solar fragrances, as we know them, have been around for decades. An early and big moment for them was in the ’80s and then in the mid-2000s. Twenty years later, they’re hip again, yet also evolved.

“The category has become far more emotional than literal,” Jones says. “A fragrance no longer has to smell overtly tropical to feel solar. Sometimes it’s the texture of warm amber, creamy woods, glowing musks, or the softness of vanilla on skin that creates that effect.”

This means that perfumers have more freedom to interpret what “solar” means in a scent today. Before, the Brown Girl Jane founder says, the category was often closely tied to beach florals, monoi, coconut, and sun care references. “Today, people also associate solar with glowing amber, salted skin, creamy musks, warm woods, and fragrances that simply feel luminous or heat-kissed,” Jones explains. In other words, the solar fragrance profile has become something much more expansive than its earliest renditions. 

Perhaps the modern solar fragrance trend feels most like an olfactory representation of an overall shift towards escapism for comfort. “Fragrance has become much more experiential. People want scents that transport them somewhere emotionally, that create atmosphere, memory, fantasy, escapism. Solar fragrances naturally do that because they immediately evoke pleasure, leisure, intimacy, heat, skin, light,” Jones says. 

It makes sense, then, that all spring long, we’ve witnessed new solar fragrances hit the shelves, be it Louboutin’s Oud Fétiche, Ellis Brooklyn’s Isla Sirena, or Boy Smells’ Solar Drip. “People are looking for fragrances that feel like a mood or a second skin,” Guerlain adds.

Even though solar scents feel inherently summer-y, they don’t have to be limited to one season. At the end of the day, the French perfumer says that solar fragrances excel at delivering “that feeling of wellbeing and warmth, sensuality and skin-likeness, even outside of summertime.”

The Best Modern Solar Fragrances