Her EDP

Burberry Her gets the job done. I've tested this through four seasons and multiple scenarios — client dinners, weekend brunches, date nights where I needed something safe but effective. The opening hits you with that candy-sweet berry explosion everyone talks about, then settles into a vanilla-musk combination that projects about 2 feet for the first three hours. By hour four, it's a skin scent that still reads as intentional. Seven hours total before it disappears completely.

Let me be clear: this isn't sophisticated perfumery. The strawberry smells like those car air fresheners, and the jasmine is doing absolutely nothing in the middle. But I wore this to a networking event last month and got three separate people asking what I was wearing. My cousin Maria said it smells like 'expensive teenage girl,' which isn't wrong. The vanilla dry-down is genuinely addictive though — I kept catching whiffs on my wrist at hour six.

The problem is ubiquity. Every college girl and half the women in my yoga class wear this now. If you want to smell like everyone else but smell good doing it, here's your fragrance. For $85, you're paying Burberry tax on a composition that should cost $40. It works, it's pleasant, it gets compliments. That's the entire story.

Look, I've smelled Burberry Her on approximately 47% of London women under 25, and I cannot stress this enough... it works. Every time. You know that moment when someone walks past and you think, 'Christ, what is that and why do I suddenly want to follow them to Waitrose?' That's Her. It's the olfactory equivalent of those old Häagen-Dazs adverts — completely ridiculous, slightly embarrassing to admit you're into it, but genuinely effective.

The brief here was clearly 'make something that smells like a hug from someone who exclusively shops at & Other Stories,' and fair play, they nailed it. Those berries up front aren't trying to be sophisticated — they're the fragrance equivalent of Love Actually. Crowd-pleasing, a bit naff if you think about it too hard, but honestly? Sometimes you just want the emotional manipulation to work. The vanilla base that kicks in around hour three is properly addictive. I've caught myself leaning in during meetings because someone's wearing this, which is either great marketing or I need to examine my life choices.

Here's the thing though — and this is where my agency brain kicks in — it's almost too successful at what it does. When every other person on the Tube is wearing your signature scent, are you really expressing anything about yourself? It's like wearing a Zara blazer. Perfectly nice, does the job, but you're not exactly making a statement. The composition feels a bit... conference room focus-grouped, if that makes sense. Like they tested every molecule on a panel of 18-24 year olds until they got maximum 'OMG what perfume are you wearing?' responses.

But genuinely (and I mean this), sometimes the crowd gets it right. Seven hours of proper performance from a designer fragrance at this price point? The math works. It's just that after five years of smelling it everywhere, I'm starting to feel like I'm trapped in an eternal Pink campaign. Effective? Absolutely. Original? About as original as putting 'Live Laugh Love' on your kitchen wall.