I tried the Victoria Bitter perfume and threw my Le Labo in the bin

‘Eau de hard work’. 

If infamous online perfume personality Jeremy Fragrance has taught me anything, it’s that a good scent is all about “power!”. Not that I’ve ever adhered to this rule – my perfume collection is comprised of either cheap, sweet spray-on (a homage to Impulse, if you will) or whatever’s trendy and inoffensive to my nostrils. 

This is because I don’t find choosing a fragrance to be a particularly picky process (blasphemous, I know!). Same with movies – if there’s romance, large amounts of online hype or a spontaneous dance number, I’ll probably enjoy it.

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It’s good to be discerning in some areas of your life (tattoos, clothing, your intrinsic moral compass) but it’s also nice to give in to the thing everyone else likes and let it all wash over you. No thoughts, head empty. Brain smooth.

And being the smooth-brained Melbourne Northside sheep I am, I own a bottle of Le Labo’s Santal 33. The fragrance of nepotism babies, ambiguous creative freelancers and underground DJs everywhere, Santal 33 permanently coats the nostrils of all Brunswick-adjacent residents. 

The irony of me saying I’m not a particularly discerning fragrance-chooser and owning a $296 bottle of smelly water does not escape me. I’m a woman of mystery; I like to keep people guessing (which is why you can find all of my embarrassing confessions on the internet, published long-form). Also, my Santal 33 bottle is coming to an end and I can’t afford another. 

So when it came time to choose a new fragrance, it needed to be very cheap and also powerful, because Jeremy Fragrance said so. I do own Hello Kitty Bubblegum Body Spray, but that’s the wrong kind of powerful. So what did I choose? Only Australia’s fastest-selling perfume ever, hun. 

Embodying the ‘very essence of hard work’, VB Thirst is the first-ever scent from iconique beer brand, Victoria Bitter. Yes, it’s a far cry from Le Labo’s signature blend of “sandalwood, cedarwood, cardamom, iris, violet and ambrox”, but it will take you from the worksite to the pub, which is always handy.

It was surprisingly difficult to get my grubby mitts on a bottle of this ale fragrance. I know I just said it was the fastest-selling perfume ever, but I live in a world of delusion (if you haven’t figured that out already). After trotting in and out of Chemist Warehouses all over inner-city Melbourne, I finally found the ‘Longneck’ variety of this gorgina scent. The ‘Stubby’ was sold out everywhere, the security guard informed me, so I had to go with its longer cousin. More beer perfume for me!

As VB ambassador Harley Breen said, “Thirst is a scent that every man can get around. It will make you wanna sniff your mate after a full day on the tools.” Thankfully, I love nothing more than sniffing my mates! Eager for the girls to get under my pits, I opened the box and removed the brown-and-gold bottle from its packaging. 

The bottle genuinely just looks like a VB beer, so there’s not much more to say re the design aesthetic. It smells surprisingly refreshing, like a more bitter, beer-forward version of Acqua Di Gio. While most of my cheaper perfumes smell like a toddler picked them out, this has a more salt-of-the-earth bloke-ness to it, which is cute.

It might be a scent the tomboy queen herself Kendall Jenner wears, or a fragrance you layer under something a little sweeter. This scent is a nod to your inner bogan, a glaring rejection of all that is trendy (which makes it very cool and niche). It smells like forgetting your shoes in a shopping centre, drinking moscato through a straw or watching Kath and Kim on the telly.  

It’s also good because if anyone scrunches their nose and asks “What’s that smell?” you can just reply with “Your dad”. So now that your AirPods are in the incinerator, I’m declaring Le Labo is out, and hoppy, masculine fragrances are in. If you’re hesitant to throw your Santal 33 in the bin, you could leave a bottle of it at your local pub instead. I hear the toilets get smelly sometimes.*

*For clarification, this article is satire. I don’t expect anyone to bin anything.

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