Las Californias by Pomare’s Stolen Perfume
Las Californias by Pomare’s Stolen Perfume
Notes (from the website) : All ingredients from the land once called Las Californias (California and Mexico) to celebrate the shared history and love for the land. Borders can be drawn and erased but our shared relationship to this land is forever.
Ingrredients grown in California and Mexico:
Red Fruits: Strawberries, Vitus Vinifera, Passionfruit, Jamaica, Angeleno orange blossom, frangipani and star jasmine, Mexican tuberose and vanilla, coastal redwood, palo Santo, black copal, tonic bean
I met Rachel, the perfumer behind Pomare’s, and left with a few bottles in my bag, but this was the first one I couldn’t wait to get on skin. I put it on almost immediately just to see how it would open up, like pressing a fresh sample strip directly into warm skin and letting it bloom in real time.
The strawberry in this is really something.
On first wear, it comes through bright and juicy, more like a memory of fruit than a literal note. There’s a jammy sweetness to it, slightly tart at the edges, like a ripe strawberry split open and pressed into warm skin. It almost feels tactile, like the soft pulp giving way under pressure, releasing juice that immediately warms and spreads. Not candy like, not syrupy, just very alive and natural, with that faint green snap you get when you bite too close to the stem.
As it settles, it doesn’t fade into a quiet skin scent in the usual sense. It still has presence and projection, but it takes on this skin adjacent quality where the fruit feels like it’s melting into your body heat rather than sitting on top of it. The texture shifts from juicy and wet to something softer and more diffused, like fruit juice slowly absorbed into warm skin. It doesn’t really transform into florals or woods in a defined way for me yet, it just spreads, thins, and fuses, becoming part of the skin’s warmth while still remaining clearly strawberry, like a ghost of fruit lingering in the pores.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. It’s not shy, but it has this strawberry funk that feels fused with your natural skin smell, almost indistinguishable from it at a certain point. It’s like the scent stops being something you’re wearing and starts feeling like something your skin is producing.
The closest way I can describe the overall impression is real fruit and botanicals dissolving into warm skin. Fruity, soft, and slightly woody in feel, but very intimate in character, like the sensation of touching something fresh and organic and then realizing it’s become part of you.
Sweet, slightly tart, jammy, and smooth, all blurring together in a really natural way, with a soft, almost velvety diffusion as it sits closer and closer to the skin.
Longevity is on the lighter side for me, but it wears close to moderate and beautifully while it lasts. It feels less like a fragrance that announces itself across a room and more like one that lives in your personal space, wrapping around your skin like a thin, warm layer rather than floating away from it.
Compared to other fruit forward fragrances I’ve tried, this leans much more naturalistic and skin bound rather than perfumey or abstract. It feels closer to the sensation of actual fruit juice on warm skin than anything in the fruity gourmand category, and it avoids the synthetic brightness that strawberry scents often fall into.
Overall, it’s a very intimate, skin adjacent fragrance built around a realistic strawberry impression. Not loud or overly complex, but incredibly evocative in its simplicity, a quiet, naturalistic fruit scent that feels more like a lived sensory moment than a constructed perfume.
Photo by me 🙂
God bless yall