The Perfume Playground

Alice du Parcq has worked as a beauty and fragrance journalist for more than twenty years, starting in the beauty departments of Tatler, the Telegraph, the Times and Glamour from the age of seventeen, then spending over a decade as Beauty Director at Conde Nast Brides and Easy Living. Her fragrance writing has since appeared in Vogue, Glamour, Sunday Times Style and the Telegraph, and Sunday Times Style itself has called her 'the industry's go-to scentfluencer'.

Her Substack, The Perfume Playground, functions as a hub for that reach: shopping guides, think-pieces, long reads and save-the-dates for the events she hosts, including an Instagram Live series, Desert Island Spritz, where she talks fragrance memories with guests. In 2026 she also wrote a perfume title for the British Library's Philosophy collection, a genuine institutional credit alongside her press career.

The writing is warm and accessible, built for readers who want a recommendation they can act on rather than a technical breakdown of the drydown. That is the register two decades in glossy beauty journalism teaches, and she is unusually good at it. Some posts sit behind a paid subscriber tier.