ALICE DU PARCQ’s best affordable perfumes under £35 – including £20 celeb fragrance and one smells as good as £234 designer bottle

My school-run friend’s jaw dropped so low you’d have thought I’d stripped to my knickers outside the Year 2 classroom.

‘I’m sorry, what?’ she stuttered.

‘It’s JLo Glow; you know, with the dangly necklace on the bottle,’ I replied.

I admit that this was possibly not the answer she expected from an award-winning perfume journalist whose Instagram is full of glamorous fragrance content.

I have my pick of several hundred luxury perfumes in my scent library and, admittedly, my reels are awash with bottles costing more than £150. However, I am adamant about including credible and affordable high-street heroes, too.

‘But it’s gorgeous!’ she said, dumbstruck that my ‘beautiful scent’ was a 20-quid celeb spritz. I understand this reaction.

As customers we’re steered into thinking that affordable perfume is inferior because the super-luxe world of designer fragrance is so absurdly loud and competitive that it overshadows everything else. Scroll on social media and you’ll be served a mix of global luxury brands or, at the other end of the scale, clickbaity ‘dupes’, ie, computer-generated copycats of famous fragrances made with cheap chemicals. We barely ever see anything in between, so naturally we assume they’re not worthy of our attention.

I’m here to shine a light on those hidden-gem scents; the quiet beauties that I promise are decently made, consciously created and don’t cost a fortune.

Think of it like shopping for a nice handbag. With a £60 budget you’re not coming home with a butter-soft Italian leather tote hand-stitched in an atelier by a heritage fashion house, right? Lower your expectations and you’ll find a very decent high-street hit from, say, M&S, Cos or & Other Stories, employing a talented design team using sustainable, premium materials in an ethically run factory. Transfer those theories to affordable scent: the bits that cost are high doses of expensive natural ingredients, deluxe packaging and catnip ad campaigns – the ‘magic dust’.

But what you can find more reasonably are skilled perfumers balancing natural oils with lower cost (but stunning) synthetics, all more modestly bottled. Still magical, just a bit less sparkly.

It makes me giggle that Le Labo Santal 33, which is £234 for 100ml, costs ten times more than the £23 for 100ml Adidas Vibes Spark Up. Both are made by the very same perfumer, Frank Voelkl, with the same passion, expertise and ethical standards.

Here are five more of my affordable favourites.

Alice’s best budget scents 

I am a huge fan of the Discover range: there are lots to choose from, but this beachy spritz has the best staying power. It’s all suntan lotion and swim-up bars with a moreish, cool and creamy linger.

I am on my fourth bottle of this rich, deep, green and nutty woodland-floor unigender perfume, which is the scent equivalent of forest bathing. There’s a gorgeous damp-trunk aura to this, so it has a very reassuring and grounding effect.

This fresh, soapy-skin scent was conceived by powerhouse Jennifer Lopez, who asked two perfumers to make a fragrance that smelt like expensive fluffy white towels in a luxury hotel bathroom. It’s the OG clean- girl scent everyone has tried to copy since.

Beloved British hairdresser Adam Reed has been a perfume superfan since his teens and is so eloquent and knowledgeable about scent, it was just a matter of time before he created his own collection. This light, gentle and comforting floral fragrance smells like a cashmere blanket woven with white petals.

Anyone who is craving a pocket-friendly hit of ‘gourmand’ pudding-trolley perfume needs to know about this brand. Everything it makes is a variation on the sweet, creamy fragrance trend; this one has a curious but delicious citrus-honey-praline combo that lasts ages and isn’t at all headachey.