Lost Cherry

This works. Here's why: Tom Ford Lost Cherry smells like the most expensive cherry cordial you've ever tasted, wrapped in velvet and marked up 400%. The opening is pure liquid cherry with that bitter almond bite that keeps it from being candy store basic. I wore this to a gallery opening in SoHo last month and had three separate people ask what I was wearing. One guy literally said 'you smell like money.' My aunt Sophia would call this 'too much for daytime' but my aunt Sophia wears White Diamonds, so.

Performance is where things get complicated. Seven hours sounds decent until you realize you're paying $360 for 50ml. I've tested drugstore gourmands that last longer. The projection stays close, maybe 2 feet max after the first hour, which means this is more intimate seduction than room domination. Perfect for dates where someone's going to be in your personal space. Less perfect for making an impression across a conference table.

Let me be clear: this is a cold weather fragrance only. I tried it during a humid August week and it turned cloying within an hour. The cherry note gets syrupy and heavy when it's over 75 degrees. Save it for fall dinners and winter events where you want to smell expensive without trying too hard. It's undeniably beautiful, but Tom Ford is charging luxury car prices for what performs like a premium ride share.

Look, I need to be honest about how I ended up with Lost Cherry. A woman I was seeing left it at my flat (along with half her skincare routine and a book she definitely wasn't coming back for), and one morning I was running late and thought... why not? And I cannot stress this enough... I spent the entire day fielding questions about what I was wearing. Three separate people asked me in the lift at work. Right?

The opening is genuinely like drinking cherry brandy while someone whispers expensive things in your ear. It's syrupy and boozy and completely ridiculous, but somehow Tom Ford makes it work without tipping into Bath & Body Works territory. The cherry isn't that artificial glacé nonsense either — it's proper grown-up cherry liqueur, the kind your nan keeps in the cabinet for 'special occasions' that never come. After about two hours, the jasmine and rose start doing their thing, and it becomes this weird cherry-floral hybrid that shouldn't work but absolutely does.

Here's the thing though: seven hours of performance for £300? That's agency day rate money for something that barely makes it through a full workday. I wore it to a client dinner once and had to sneak a spritz from the sample in my jacket pocket before dessert arrived. It's like buying a Michelin star meal that comes on a side plate — gorgeous while it lasts, but you're definitely leaving hungry.