Since its launch in 2019, the niche British perfume brand Ffern has produced some of the most coveted fragrances money can buy. The demand is, in part, because the perfumes are scarce. Ffern releases only four seasonal fragrances a year. Each one is timed to an equinox or solstice, and the scents are handmade in small batches in Somerset, England, and sourced with natural ingredients.
Ffern Summer 25
What’s the story behind Ffern’s new fragrance?
Every Ffern scent starts with a moodboard: Most are based on a bucolic setting or transient moment of beauty, like the inside of a greenhouse or a specific time of day in a woodland glade. For Summer 2025, the brand’s perfumer, Elodie Durande, worked with its founder, Owen Mears, and his creative-director sister, Emily Cameron. In this fragrance, they created a tribute to midsummer sunsets, which give the impression of being longer and more radiant than those at any other time of year.
Every Ffern scent is issued with a different artist collaboration. When you purchase a fragrance, you also receive a frameable print. The artist collaborator for summer 2025 is Japanese collagist and watercolorist Fumi Imamura, who created an illustration inspired by the perfume’s peach and marigold notes. It looks like a fruit tree covered in flowers.
What does Summer 2025 smell like?
Think of the moment you pierce the skin of a citrus fruit and begin to unpeel it. That’s exactly how Summer 2025 smells when you first spray it. Juicy grapefruit and blood orange come forward first, then the apricot-like scent of davana, an herb native to India and associated with aromatherapy intended to reduce stress.
When you spray it on, the first impression is like the bright, color-streaked part of the sunset. As the fragrance settles into your skin, you smell spicy cardamom and nutmeg, glowing and mingled with jasmine. It ends with notes of hay, vetiver, and cedar, conjuring the feeling of earth that’s still warm just after the sun has dipped below the horizon. As Durande, the perfumer, says, “The fragrance is like a very slow exhale. It doesn’t simply describe a sunset. It lets you actually feel it.”
What impression will this perfume leave on other people?
We asked three strangers at the Union Square Greenmarket for their first impressions to find out.
“This makes me feel immediately happy,” said a 20-something woman. “It’s sparkly! I want to keep sniffing it over and over again.”
“It’s citrusy and fresh!” said a man who looked to be about 30 years old. “It smells like fresh fruit, but I’m also smelling spices and something warm, like wood.”
“I want him to wear this every day,” said his girlfriend. “I would steal it and wear it every day, too.”
What else is special about Ffern’s Summer 2025 fragrance?
Notably, Durande used peach water instead of plain H2O when blending the fragrance. This note doesn’t appear often in perfume. All of the ingredients are natural and seasonal. Ffern’s packaging is made from completely recyclable cardboard, and every bottle comes with a diffuser stone, handmade by tile-makers. It also includes a sample vial so you can smell the fragrance and decide whether or not you like it before opening the full size. Not for you? Just send it back.
How do I get my hands on the Ffern fragrance?
The brand sells its fragrances primarily via its subscription service or “ledger.” Once you join, you are guaranteed to receive every seasonal fragrance Ffern offers. It costs nothing to join, but you’re charged $129 for each scent.
A limited number of bottles are also available for nonmembers to order or buy at Ffern’s boutique in London, but once a scent is sold out, it will never be reproduced. This FOMO-provoking practice works: The wait list to join Ffern’s ledger reportedly has hundreds of thousands of names on it. The Summer 2025 fragrance is available right now, though, so grab it while you can.
Two more artisanal fragrances to try:
Kindred Black Fleurs Sauvages Edition 2025
Slow perfumery, like the slow-food movement, is all about locally sourced ingredients and respecting changes that can occur in botanical scents each time the plant or flower is harvested. Every year, New York–based perfumery Kindred Black issues a different wildflower scent for summer. For 2025, it drew upon blooms from the Susquehanna Valley, like wild cranesbill, dame’s rocket, musk mallow, milkweed, bush honeysuckle, and wild lilac — and captured their essences in a handblown glass bottle. Smells like a walk in a sunlit meadow.
Strange Invisible Perfumes Aquarian Rose
California-based Strange Invisible Perfumes creates organic, small-batch botanical scents using a traditional method called hydro-distillation, which is a very gentle way to extract the aromas from plants using water instead of steam. The brand’s rose fragrances are particularly special: Hydro-distillation preserves the full spectrum of the flower’s scent molecules, so they smell fresh and alive. Aquarian Rose is like a just-picked rose floating in a bowl of water.