Worth It: A Perfume For The Discerning Nose

Much unlike many a magazine editor who recommends you buy all sorts of crap that they most likely got for free, your Jezebel staff doesn’t get jack shit (other than books, unsolicited). And that’s how it should be. But on our own time, in our personal lives, we still buy stuff. So this is Worth It, our daily recommendation of random things that we’ve actually spent our own money on. These are the things we buy regularly or really like, things we’d actually tell our friends about. And now we’re telling you.

Sometime in grad school, I became a perfume person. I’d never much bothered with the stuff before, but something about spending five months of the year swaddled in down (I lived in Iowa) made me want to pretty myself up in other ways. However, my tastes were a bit exacting. I’ve long disliked fruit and flower scents — I’m pretty sure I ODed on them during the Bath & Body Works epidemic of the mid-nineties. I’ve tried wearing men’s cologne, and a variety of cheapish musky scents for women, but none of them really hit it out of the park for me. Then I discovered Tokyo Milk’s Honey & The Moon.

To be clear, Honey & The Moon is sweet. It even lists one of its ingredients as “sugared violet,” so I guess it’s technically floral. But it’s not prissy, English-rose floral. It’s like, midnight garden-party floral. Trampling-on-jasmine-while-running-barefoot floral. Debutante-with-a-dark-secret floral. One time on the hottest day of summer I was walking a few paces behind this girl with a cutout in the back of her dress, and because she thought no one was watching, she spread her arms and twirled around. That kind of floral.

I wear Honey & The Moon pretty much every day, and it’s often the extra treat I need to convince myself to get up and dressed when I’d rather sleep. I’ve tried some of TokyoMilk’s other scents, but they don’t grab me as much — Paper & Cotton even gave me a rash. I do have my eye (nose?) on a bottle of Bittersweet, though — it smells like a darker, sexier version of my old standby. And since both are under $30 an ounce (which lasts a long time), I can enjoy them without going bankrupt.

Honey & The Moon perfume, $28 at TokyoMilk

Worth It only features things we paid for ourselves and actually like. Don’t send us stuff.