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.

On trust: this is mainstream lifestyle-press fragrance writing rather than specialist criticism, warm and accessible rather than technically dense. As with most mainstream beauty journalists, her career has run alongside close working relationships with brand PR (product sent for coverage, brand-hosted events), so this is not the same arm's-length, no-collaborations stance as some of the smaller independent voices in this directory; it sits closer to the entertainment and lifestyle end of the spectrum, backed by two decades of genuine press credibility. The Substack itself is newer than her wider career, so its own archive is thinner than the legacy blogs, and some content sits behind a paid subscriber tier.