What GIRLS smell like 🎀🪞🩰🦢🕯️

Specifically Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna

and

Jul 22, 2025

When Girls premiered in 2012, people had strong feelings: it was indulgent, kind of gross, and so painfully self-aware that millennials felt read to filth. And for those of us with creative ambitions, Lena Dunham having an HBO show at 25 felt like a hate crime. For Gen Z, though, the show feels less like staring into an unflattering mirror and more like scrolling an archival Tumblr moodboard. They’re addicted to Hannah’s relentless self-analysis, Jessa’s feral glamour, Marnie’s delusional poise, and Shoshanna’s helium-brained pragmatism. Today, the series reads as romantic: no Instagram face, no Stanley cups, no TikTok-induced twitches, just raw twenty-somethings in the bougie part of Brooklyn trying to figure out how to be adults. Given the show’s Gen Z revival and the drop of Lena Dunham’s first series in over a decade (Too Much, it’s horny), we’re scenting our sweet Girls.

Naturally, the Girls universe has a stench. It’s indie sleaze adjacent in the Brooklyn and PBR of it all, but this is a little more broke, more bookish, more xoJane comment section. It’s secondhand smoke in your thrifted babydoll dress, bodega coffee clutched in mittened hands, Nag Champa drifting through your Greenpoint loft as you crack open a first edition Philip Roth, a spilled kombucha in your New Yorker tote soaking your Luna Bar and three loose Klonopin. It smells like ambition gone sour, a panic attack on the L train, eyeliner smudged at 2 a.m., and someone yelling, “I’m the voice of my generation… or a voice… of a generation.”

Fraaagola Saalaaata by Hilde Soliani

Thanks to my thousands of dollars spent on Italian classes, I can tell you that this scent name translates to “Straaawberry Saaaalt” in English, and thanks to my thousands of hours spent watching HBO’s Girls, I can tell you that it would absolutely be worn by one Hannah Horvath. Hannah is nothing if not chaotic, driven primarily by her neuroses and horrible taste in men. She is whiny and clumsy, unable to put together an outfit or enough money to live. Her dad is gay and her mom is flustered and her friends are narcissists. God, I love her! Perhaps she would have been exposed to some Hilde Soliani samples at one of her many blogging gigs—the perfumer herself has a Horvathian flair for the dramatic, all of her fragrances being insane powerclashes of notes that work if you’re also a little cuckoo. (Note that "power clashing” was coined by Elijah during a coke binge when he dressed Hannah as “a girl I went to middle school with who fucked both her uncle and her stepdad.”) Hannah would absolutely be at home in the cloying, sweet, infantilizing-yet-sexual notes of Fraaagola Saalaaata—and as someone who often looks like I left in a rush, so would I.

Hot or cold? Sweaty on the subway.
Color? Blood red.
Which Girl is she? Hannah.
Room in the house? Poorly ventilated bathroom filled with overpriced candles.
Animal? Reactive Doodle.
Theme song? “I Love It” by Icona Pop.
Texture? Macerated Strawberries.
Signature drink? Whatever’s cheapest.
Favorite word? “Bump?”
Ripe or dead? Perfectly ripe.

-Crissy

Fleur de Peau by Diptyque

As soon as we decided to scent Girls, I just knew deep in my cells that Marnie smells like Fleur de Peau. I find this scent challenging in the same way I found Marnie to be the most triggering character when I first watched. I always wanted to be a Hannah or Jessa, but like many millennials, I feared I was a Marnie: A-type, rigid, tension seeping from her pores, desperate to be creative but simply not in any way creative. She was literally painful to watch. I’ll never forget my ex’s party in 2013 when I plugged in my phone to play one of my own terrible rap songs (I really thought I was the next Uffie), and a friend stopped me and said, “Anna, don’t be Marnie in Girls.” (A reference of course to Marnie’s famously cringe performance of Kanye West’s “Stronger” at her ex’s party.) Fleur de Peau is the perfume equivalent of that moment, of trying so hard to seem effortlessly cool that you make everyone around you uncomfortable. The iris and ambrette grasp at sophistication, but there’s a cloying, antiseptic note that’s impossible to ignore. It smells clean in the way a recently scrubbed public bathroom smells clean: sterile, medicinal, borderline suffocating. Fleur de Peau doesn’t breathe; it clenches. But sometimes clenching your jaw until your gums bleed is the only way to survive in this economy! (Marnie grew on me; so did Fleur de Peau.)

Hot or cold? Warm heart encased in ice.
Color? Indigo.
Which Girl is she? Marnie.
Room in the house? Yoga studio.
Animal? Praying mantis.
Theme song? “Clean” by Taylor Swift.
Texture? Plastic wrap on dry cleaning.
Signature drink? Vodka tonic.
Favorite word? [Clears throat.]
Ripe or dead? Dead, skin turning blue.

-Anna

Bois d’Ascèse by Naomi Goodsir

Jessa definitely smells like cult classique smoke bomb Bois d’Ascèse. I’m sure she personally knows the very niche Australian-born, Paris-based perfumer Naomi Goodsir and will casually recall the time they smoked together outside a gallery in the Marais while smoking outside a show in Williamsburg. This scent is all tobacco and whiskey, Jessa’s two favorite things. In fact, she liked the latter so much she had to seek treatment for it, and Bois d’Ascèse gives her a little hit when she’s trying to be good. It also smells like the incense Jessa lights to clear the stench of cigs when her judgy cousin Shosh comes over. Bois d’Ascèse is sexy, smoky, and quietly devastating, much like Jemima Kirke’s cheekbones. It’s the scent of a campfire at rehab, a bonfire outside a Bushwick warehouse, or lightly setting Hannah on fire because she needs to just shut the fuck up for a second.

Hot or cold? Hot hot smoke.
Color? Golden like Jemima Kirke’s luscious locks.
Which Girl is she? Jessa, obvi.
Room in the house? Smoking porch.
Animal? Moth circling a flame.
Theme song? “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths.
Texture? Charred leather.
Signature drink? Whiskey neat.
Favorite word? “Fag” (as in cigarettes in England!!).
Ripe or dead? On fire but not dead yet!

-Anna

Baccarat Rouge 540 by Maison Francis Kurkdjian

What, you thought we were anti-mainstream here? Shoshanna might’ve gotten into some subtle foreign perfumes when she lived in Japan—maybe some Issey Miyake—but let’s be real, Shosh would absolutely be wearing the girlboss of fragrances, Baccarat Rouge 540, like it was her goddamned job. Maybe she saw it when it went viral on TikTok, maybe she saw that Olivia Rodrigo can’t live without it. However it came to be, Shoshanna is layering this with Dove deodorant and Aesop hand wash (whenever she can afford it). You can smell it on her toddler’s head and all her Upper East Side mommy clothes. This scent was probably made for mysterious, married-to-millionaire, eternal muse Jessas but has been seized by she-EO Shoshannas, and why not? It’s kind of impossible to describe, switching from ‘dentist’s office’ to ‘spicy cedarwood’ to ‘spun sugar’ and back to ‘hospital’ in the span of five minutes. It’s powerful and undeniably feminine, soothing and hyper. It’s ultimately addictive, like Shoshanna herself or the meth that she accidentally smoked. You smell it again and again, trying to figure out if you actually like it or if you actually want it eradicated from the planet—the Shoshanna effect, if you will.

Hot or cold? Cold plunge after hot yoga.
Color? Pink Rare Beauty blush.
Which Girl is she? Shoshanna.
Room in the house? Foyer of a $5 million brownstone.
Animal? Sugar glider.
Theme song? “Money” by Cardi B (played at Soul Cycle).
Texture? Vapor.
Signature drink? Dirty Shirley.
Favorite word? “Bougie.”
Ripe or dead? Dead but somehow still talking.