If you need your perfume to be a radioactive bomb of synthetic vanilla and lab-created flowers, Molecule is not for you.

If this year has taught us anything, it’s that niche perfumes aren’t here to please the masses. They’re bold, complex, and sometimes even polarizing. But that’s exactly what makes them so incredible.

If there’s one fragrance dominating the scene lately, it’s Libre Intense by Yves Saint Laurent. Marketed as bold, elegant, and powerful, it presents itself as the scent of the modern, independent woman. But is it truly an olfactory revolution or just another repetitive formula with a fancy bottle? Let’s break it down, note by note.

That wonderful excuse for perfumers to play gods, mixing ingredients like Renaissance alchemists while we, mere mortals, try to figure out whether we want to smell like a “haunted forest after the storm” or “lust in a dusty library.”