This Scent Is Designed To Smell Like Love & It Actually Deliver

Love is a secret language with no words at all. It’s a look shared from across the room, an inside joke, a song, a touch. No matter what form it takes — romantic, platonic, familial, or any other type of love that shows up in a lifetime — it’s a fluency cultivated and shared between two people who care deeply for one another.

One of the most intimate and elusive parts of this language is scent. The way your lover smells has very little to do with the fragrance they wear — it’s more about all the little parts of them that make up who they are. It’s the smell of their skin in the morning, their hair when their head is on your shoulder, their lip gloss in the back of an Uber, the smell of them in the shower while you do your makeup in the hotel mirror. It’s an amalgamation of many things, as unique to them as their fingerprint.

Recreating your lover’s scent isn’t quite as easy as wearing their favorite products or tracing their steps throughout the day. But, you can emulate that same comforting feeling with the right fragrance. The new perfume by The Maker, aptly named Lover, sets out to do exactly that.

Meet Lover

Lover is an inviting woody scent created to evoke a warm embrace. It’s a big claim, but it’s successful in execution — almost eerily so.

When it hits your skin, the perfume reads as complex, softly sweet, and earthy. As it wears over time, it melts down and creates an inviting, enveloping you in an aroma that wears more quietly as the day goes on, calling you closer for another hit of it.

Bold sandalwood serves as the scent's base, and feels sturdier and more grounding than the whisper of blonde wood that typically appears in fragrance formulations. The addition of juicy fig adds a subtle and surprising sweetness to the scent. It’s understated, but serves as the fluttering heartbeat of the fragrance — just like the butterflies you feel when you’re in love.

There is a really nice duality in the pairing of intense vetiver and dreamy Jasmine Sambac, two opposite notes that work to balance each other. The fragrance is finished with the slightest bit of oud, a commanding scent that takes on an unexpected delicateness here that’s reminiscent of the way that love can bend something (or someone) strong into something softer.

Woodsy scents like this one connect to something instinctual within us — almost primal. Their strength delivers a sense of safety, while their familiarity brings feelings of comfort and home.

Lover taps into those very ideas, and weaves them together with the interplay of intimacy that tells its story really effectively.

My Love Affair With Lover

Last weekend, I was hit with a pang of longing from missing my own lover while he was overseas traveling for work. On Sunday morning, I was changing my bedding, and as I pulled the sheets off the mattress, his t-shirt tumbled out.

Without even thinking, I brought the shirt to my face and inhaled, and it smelled like him. Not his fragrance, but his skin, his laundry, his products, his sweat, all of the things that intertwine to create the DNA of his unique scent — and it made me miss him more.

When I spritzed on my Lover perfume later that day, it served not so much as an antidote to the longing, but as a temporary balm until he got back.

Final thoughts

Lover may not smell exactly like the object of your affection, but it’s not really supposed to.

It does, however, evoke the same feelings as a big hug after a long day or snuggling up in a partner’s old sweatshirt. Though it can’t replicate the scent of love, it can mimic the comforting feelings of its special, silent language.