Dawn Spencer Hurwitz Au Lait is nice, sweet, and clean. It’s heralded in various online fragrance community as THE milk scent, and I do get notes of condensed milk and vanilla; on me, this is more of a vanilla fragrance than a caramel one, and it’s not much like steamed milk at all.
While I find this fragrance pleasant enough, the musk note is apparent right from the beginning (I usually expect musks in the drydown), and it just throws off the comforting, foody scent of the perfume. There’s something about it that makes my nose and throat feel “uneasy,” even though it doesn’t make me sneeze. When I was a kid, I stupidly decided to rub Johnson & Johnson baby wash on my tongue to see what getting my mouth washed out with soap would be like (I used to read about it happening to characters in books, and I was an impressionable and weird kid), and something about that note almost puts the taste of a light, clean baby soap back on my tongue. I know I’m the odd one out here, but while I could fall asleep with this on after hours of wear, there’s no way I could sleep with this freshly applied before bed. It’s just too perfumey and not foody enough.
The sillage of this fragrance is not huge, but the scent does last for hours on me when applied in and near the baby hairs at the sides of my neck.
