She would encourage every bit of it and let me sit near her dressing table, allowing me to fiddle with her array of blushes, perfumes, and lipsticks that were just strewn around her vintage mirror. 

It is the kind of comfortable chaos I enjoy even today, and I know nani dearly loved me because I was the only one who was allowed to test out every single product with the seriousness of conducting scientific research.

The first time I came across a perfume was hers. It was called Cobra by Jeanne Arthes.  I would apply it and roam around the house wearing her big heels and carrying a dupatta with a bag, channelling my little inner diva. 

And looking back, I think nani was teaching me something without meaning to… that you try things on before you decide if they’re yours.

I’ve been conducting the same research for the last seven years, with a byline attached. Writing about beauty means you get to try things out constantly. And honestly, a lot of it is blurry in my mind.

There is a new lip tint, a new sunscreen, or a blush launching every week. There were days when half my arm was filled with lipstick swatches, my wrist smelled like three different kinds of vanilla fragrance, and I was writing notes like ‘the pink one, not the other pink one’ because my brain had simply given up on keeping track.

And TBH, access sounds glamorous until you realise that too much of anything eventually becomes background noise. 

Finding My Signature Scent, the Dupe Way

Tom Ford Oud Minérale

But something stopped me in my tracks nearly a year ago. It was a mini tester of Tom Ford’s Oud Minérale. It was striking, to say the least. It made me feel sexy, confident, and just someone who is, well, unattainable.

“ I felt like a rich woman from the Hamptons.”

I had tried the tester out for a long night of dancing with my friends. This was in Delhi’s peak heat in May 2025. All together, dancing in an underground bar with *literally* no oxygen, smoke in the air, singing our lungs out to Empire State of Mind by Jay-Z. So you can imagine the way I’d be sweating, but this perfume stuck around even when my heels couldn’t. 

What I didn’t expect was the way it moved. How, over the course of a few hours of me dancing till the club turned on its glaring lights, it settled into something aquatic and cool, almost contradicting itself. I wore it until it faded, and then I thought about it for days.

The Attar (other) Attempt

I put it to use again, but there was the tiniest smidge of perfume left in the tester, and my heart was breaking a li’l. I am just trying to be coy about it; I could have cried a river. I didn’t know I could get attached to a perfume. This much. 

But once you’re obsessed–there really is no going back.

The logical next step wasn’t to buy it. It was to go to my local attar guy.  Nani would have approved — try it on before you decide if it’s yours, remember?

If you’ve grown up in India, you probably know someone like him. He sits in a small shop, surrounded by rows of dark glass bottles, and he can replicate almost any designer fragrance in the form of attar. It is a concentrated, oil-based fragrance. And it doesn’t contain alcohol, which means it lasts beyond 8 hours. 

This is a whole economy we are talking about that exists quietly alongside the luxury fragrance world. 

And while they may be emerging as a new challenge for the fragrance industry, they appeal to all genders and demographics. In our dupe-maxxed culture, they’re likely here to stay.

 

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In fact, a simple scroll on Instagram and you’ll find there are endless reels and carousels on dupes for luxury perfumes. Over the last two years, there have been nearly 5 billion views on hashtag #dupe. The dupe culture, in many ways, is prompted by apps such as Fragrantica. 

While erstwhile designers and brand owners may be rolling in their graves, knowing that in 2026, their OGs would be getting copied left, right, and centre.

They don’t know the situation up here. Our feeds are flooded with lavish holidays and designer ensembles which stoke a desire for luxury that we cannot afford. Not at least in this economy [cries while spritzing attar bhaiya’s Miss Dior]. 

But, you know what. It makes sense why the world of fragrance is flooded with dupes… 

And well, why? The moment my tester got over, I went to the attar guy who sits in a scrawny, little shop in the main market of Lajpat Nagar. 

The attar shop in Lajpat Nagar

We are a price-sensitive generation; we want value for our buck. The 2008 recession, along with a pandemic and the current economic downturn, explains why. 

Nobody can come and tell this generation, ‘back in our time’, because have you seen what we went through in our own time?!

I described Tom Ford to him as best I could.  In fact, I showed him the notes of the perfume on Fragrantica too.  

Pro tip: if you are wondering how a perfume would really smell before you choose to buy it, visit Fragrantica. Consider it the Bible. It is a massive online encyclopedia and community dedicated to perfumes and fragrance.

Fragrantica breaking down the notes of Tom Ford’s Oud Minérale EDP [Photograph: Fragrantica]

How it opened heavy and resinous and then, over hours, did something I hadn’t smelled before, let alone experienced. The perfume turned aquatic. Cool and mineral, like the oud had dipped itself in seawater.

That contradiction and how it made me feel was the thing I was chasing.

He nodded, went into his bottles, and came back with something a few days later. I tried it on my wrist. It was close, and boy, was I genuinely impressed. 

And then he said, almost apologetically: “Madam, 19-20 ka fark hoga.”

Nineteen to twenty. Close, but not the same. And honestly, his statement at first didn’t affect me that much. 

I wore it anyway, for weeks. I loved it. But I knew exactly what the fark was, because I had felt the original settle on my skin. 

His version stayed warm. The oud in his attar was beautiful, but it never made that turn. It never went aquatic. It never gave me that strange, contradictory coolness that had stopped me on a sweaty May night in Delhi. 

That specific transformation — resinous to mineral, heavy to cool — was the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about. And now, wearing the dupe every day, I could feel its absence like a missing note. 

That’s when I spent ₹20,000. Not on impulse, though. 

The dupe economy is supposed to make luxury accessible, and it does. But in my case it did something else entirely. 

Something I hadn’t planned for.

I went into that small shop not knowing what I wanted, exactly. I came out knowing the precise thing I couldn’t live without. The dupe hadn’t failed me. It had done something more useful.

It gave me the language to understand my own nose. Wearing it every day for weeks meant that when I finally walked into the Tom Ford counter, I wasn’t guessing. I was confirming.

Twenty thousand rupees. No regrets. Because here’s the thing about a signature scent…

You don’t choose it so much as recognise it. And sometimes you need the almost-right version to show you exactly where the right one lives on your skin.

Nani taught me that at four. It took me twenty years, a sweaty night in Delhi, and one attar shop to really understand what she meant.

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