Maybe it’s the brutal New York winter I just lived through, the return of Love Island USA, or the 10 new bronzers on my desk right now, but I am feeling summer more than maybe ever before. It’s already sticky and 100 degrees anyway, so it only makes sense I’m feeling the magnetic pull of days spent bouncing from one lounge chair to the next. But while I await a summer vacation (or just the weekend), faking it will have to do. The beauty editor in me immediately looked toward my summer fragrance tray. If I have to be inside all day, I might as well smell the part, right?
A mix of new launches and old favorites make up my go-to summer perfumes right now. But after a couple whiffs, I realized one thing: Basically everything has a passionfruit note. It’s the juicy, tangy, mouthwatering fruity scent at the top of all the buzzy new scents right now: By/Rosie Jane’s Matilda, Emporio Armani’s Power of You, Lore Disfruta. Passionfruit feels tropical and fresh, one spritz immediately evoking the same feeling as being handed a pornstar martini off the coast of Antibes.
Unfortunately, the big passionfruit perfumes right now all have one other thing in common: They’re $$$. Just in time for summer, though, I found a $30 alternative. Meet Zara’s Exotic Maracuja Eau de Parfum.
Zara’s got a whole host of hidden-gem fragrances for an affordable price point, if you didn’t know. Their Solar Mango scent is a Cosmo editor favorite this summer, and Red Temptation is a surprisingly effective alternative to Baccarat Rouge 540. Exotic Maracuja equally delights.
The overarching scent is white floral, with lily of the valley creating a somewhat soapy, clean, and smooth fragrance. But the passionfruit opening instantly takes over to give this a fresh, tropical, and even slightly sweet scent. There’s a tartness that reminds me of the scent when you first cut open a passionfruit, and the juices trickle down your hand (that’s the lotus flower adding a watery vibe). It’s overripe and lush, but not airy or coconut-based like other beachy or aquatic perfumes. This might be thanks to the base note, vanilla, which makes it smell less like a realistic fruit and more like a gourmand fragrance.
Honestly, if I sniffed this not knowing, I’d expect a $200+ price tag easily. It’s blended well, but not so much so that you lose all the notes together (a common issue I find with cheap perfumes). It’s shockingly strong, too. I smelled this on myself even a day after I spritzed it in stores.
It’s not an exact dupe for any of the luxury fragrances in my collection—nor is it trying to be. Instead, it carves out a lane of its own. And at a fraction of the price of many of the scents I’ve been testing over the past month, it’s an easy reach for layering or simply spraying with abandon all season long. And this summer, that feels especially fitting: everyone seems to want to smell like passionfruit.
Beth Gillette is the beauty editor at Cosmopolitan with eight years of experience researching, writing, and editing hair, makeup, nail, and fragrance stories.
Beth Gillette is the beauty editor at Cosmopolitan, where she covers skincare, makeup, hair, nails, and more across digital and print. She can generally be found in bright eyeshadow furiously typing her latest feature or hemming and hawing about a new product you "have to try." Prior to Cosmopolitan, she wrote and edited beauty content as an Editor at The Everygirl for four years. Follow her on Instagram for makeup selfies and a new hair 'do every few months.
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