The first time I smelled Glossier You was in 2017 in a cramped fragrance booth at a pop-up shop below the brand’s original SoHo store. With a separate entrance, heavy velvet curtains, and mirrored walls, it felt worlds away from the cheerful millennial-pink emporium.
I pressed a button to reveal what seemed remarkably similar to a glory hole (not that I’d know). Instead of genitalia, a gloved hand came through the wall, spritzing me with founder Emily Weiss’s sweet nectar. The experience was completely strange and intoxicating.
In that moment, I was the You, her You. If Weiss was a living, breathing personification of Glossier and Glossier the capitalist incarnation of Weiss, then You took the essence of both and made it feel personal to all of us.
“Somehow the heartbeat, the emotion of the brand, was captured in a bottle,” says John Demsey, a beauty-industry consultant and former Estée Lauder executive. Kyle Leahy, Glossier’s C.E.O., tells me it’s her favorite product from the entire brand lineup. “I think it represents the ethos of Glossier so perfectly.” And many people would agree. According to the company, a bottle of You is sold every 20 seconds.
Now Glossier adds to the original fragrance two extensions it calls Impressions of You, which are timed to coincide with its 10th anniversary. Glossier is entering its next decade by doubling down on You, both the fragrance and that original idea of identification.
The brand is “not named ‘Emily Weiss,’” Leahy says. “It was always about you. It was always about the community, and it was always about a collective of people. It is so much bigger than any one person.”
When Glossier You launched, in 2017, the fragrance landscape was largely made up of celebrity scents (the “Thems”) and expensive designer parfums that invited wearers to join an elite “Us.” You was a breath of fresh air. The fragrance, with its slightly musky, powdery floral notes that smell a little different on everyone—although most scents do—is the olfactory expression of the brand’s “skin first, makeup second” credo.
“There’s a certain form of simplicity about Glossier that I really connect with, and that was what we were trying to capture as a fragrance,” says Frank Voelkl, the perfumer behind all the Yous. “What is important about the success of the fragrance is what stays, what remains with you as a scent is quite addictive.”
The extension of the You-niverse is well timed. Today’s Glossier is no longer Weiss’s indie darling but rather an established brand with real-world challenges. After relinquishing her C.E.O. crown in 2022, she was replaced by a C-suite of industry bigwigs, further solidifying Glossier’s image as a capital-B Business. Throughout it all, You became a hero product, topping viral favorites like Sol de Janeiro’s Cheirosa ’62 and Phlur’s Missing Person as the best-selling fragrance at Sephora in 2023, six years after its launch.
Slowly and then all at once, Weiss was eclipsed as the center of the Glossier eco-system with a far more reliable mascot: You.
“Rather than being obsessed with her, be obsessed with yourself,” says Demsey of Glossier’s message.
Impressions of You—which consists of the indulgent, sweet-smelling You Rêve and You Doux, a woody white floral—solidifies the dawn of a new Glossier, a You Glossier. Created by Voelkl, both share the original’s base notes of ambrox and ambrette to maintain that skin-enhancing allure.
Rêve (French for “dream”) feels sensual and heady, “a moment of joy and pleasure,” Voelkl explains, with buttercream, toasted almond, sandalwood, and plum butter. Meanwhile, he says, Doux (French for “soft”) speaks to a woman’s “inner strength, her confidence, her serenity,” opening with powdery violet followed by palo santo, myrrh, and frankincense.
But if this is the new heart of Glossier, there are still some points that need to be fleshed out. The use of French, to start, is seemingly at odds with the unfussy nature of the original You—a barrier to a scent built around its ability to work for anyone. And the words themselves, “dream” and “soft,” feel almost generic, neither giving any real information about their namesakes.
That ambiguity was evident throughout the Impressions of You rollout. For starters, some editors and influencers received the fragrances in a locked box before the launch party. That was held at a secret location, which attendees reached by ferry. (They landed at a warehouse in Long Island City. Surprise!)
Whether by design or luck, it worked. According to a source close to the matter, both Rêve and Doux hit $1 million in sales online and in Glossier stores on the day they launched. Within four days, sales for the collection reportedly exceeded Sephora’s first-month forecast.
It was at that launch party that I spotted Weiss herself. She stood alone against red velvet curtains, eerily similar to the ones at the original You pop-up in 2017. Wearing an asymmetric satin gown dotted with rosettes, she sipped her champagne, taking in the large, throbbing warehouse. She may have made this world, but it no longer revolves around her.
Danielle Cohen is a New York–based beauty writer whose work has appeared in Elle, Allure, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications
