Rewrite and translate this title What the sinister cherry perfume renaissance says about our times to Japanese between 50 and 60 characters. Do not include any introductory or extra text; return only the title in Japanese.

Cherry perfumes are everywhere right now. From viral TikToks to noisy perfume counters, their sweet, sickly scent feels impossible to escape, with new releases like Room 1015’s Cherry Punk, New Notes’s Latte di Cherry and Kayali’s LoveFest Burning Cherry joining old classics like Tom Ford’s Lost Cherry. But today’s cherry is not the innocent scent we once knew, darker, boozier, smokier and more complex – a revealing insight into our shifting desires. But what’s fueling this obsession and what does it say about our collective psyche?

Cherries evoke the idealised, unattainable feminine: flirty, enticing, just out of reach. They are steeped in the subtly taboo – think: Audrey Horne knotting a cherry stem with her tongue on Twin Peaks; Katy Perry tasting cherry chapstick when she kisses a girl and likes it; Angelina Jolie slurping a maraschino in Girl, Interrupted on day release from a psychiatric institution. Cherry perfumes exist in this space of artificial fantasy. What we think of as cherry is not the fruit you’d pluck from a tree but saccharine, shiny and plasticky; these scents bear little resemblance to the actual fruit.

The revival of cherry perfumes feels timely in an age drunk on nostalgia, coinciding with the sticky persistence of two trends: the remnants of Y2K aesthetics and the rise of “tradwife” ideals. Seemingly opposite, both are hyper-feminine fantasies of a simpler time that never existed, conveniently sweeping the realities of those eras under the table. When the present feels unstable, we yearn for the comfort of an illusionary past and the familiarity of super-sweet gourmand scents like cherry can offer comforting escapism.

Writer Arabelle Sicardi – an expert on the intersection of beauty, technology and power – highlights the troubling connection between the rise of such fragrances and other auspices of hyperfemininity in the current political climate: “It’s a bit unsettling considering it’s happening alongside the rise of conservative politics and regression of women’s reproductive health.” Cherries, Sicardi explains, have long represented femininity and fertility across different cultures and religions. Yet Sicardi suggests that cherries’ inherent complexity holds the potential for more interesting stories. “There’s over 1,000 cherry variations, and so many ways to interpret the scent – the tartness, the acidity, the juice, the colour. Just like there’s many ways to be a girl.”

This opens space for subversive fragrances that defy traditional gender norms. Sicardi highlights Primal Yell from Amphora Parfum, which uses cherry as a top note but adds bitter almond (a nod to Dior Poison and cyanide’s bitter taste) and hot iron as an opener. “Rather than being cloying and sickly sweet, like an artificial cherry medicine, it’s a deeply feminine, vampiric rage.”

Cherries carry contradictions, embodying both innocence and lust. On screen, cherry pie often symbolises a Lynchian darkness; trouble bubbling beneath the facade of white-picket suburbia. Agent Cooper savors a slice while investigating the murder of a homecoming queen in Twin Peaks; Betty Applewhite claims she’s baking cherry pie to excuse bloodstains in Desperate Housewives. Cherry evokes unnerving perfection – the diner waitress with a grin stretched too wide. This duality is mirrored in the fruit itself. Cherry pits contain amygdalin, which can turn into cyanide when chewed, while benzaldehyde – the compound that gives cherry perfumes their almond-like scent – is used in embalming, leading to viral comparisons of cherry perfumes to the smell of cadavers. By exploring cherry’s darker undertones, perfumers tap into our cultural fascination with beauty meeting danger.

Perfumers today lean into this tension, pushing cherry into darker, stranger territories. These fragrances lure us with a familiar sweetness, only to unravel into something unsettling, exposing nostalgia as a veneer masking darker undercurrents. The cherry pie on the windowsill may still beckon us, but today’s perfumers spike it with a poison that demands we taste the past more critically.

At London’s Bloom Perfumery, customers often pick cherry when they want sweetness, but with more bite than your typical vanilla. Bloom’s ‘Charming Cherries’ sample pack includes Sly John’s Lab’s Cherry Passion (“memories of Bakewell tarts”), alongside boozier iterations of cherry that contrast the sweetness against deeper, sultry bases. Kirsch by Headspace for example, (“the perfect leathery cherry liqueur”), pairs cherry with notes of leather, rum, oakmoss and sake. Meanwhile, Born Screaming by Toskovat sees cherry in bed with saliva and latex, intended to “evoke a French dance troupe growing dizzy on a communal bowl of LSD spiked sangria.” On Toskovat’s website, the perfume’s notes include “Energy Drink, DVD Case, Smoke, Popped balloon, Adult Toys, Pearl necklace”.

Indecent Cherry by the South Korean brand BORNTOSTANDOUT is “for those who’ve perfected the innocent smile with a devilish glow in their eye,” according to BORNTOSTANDOUT’s Brand Manager Kris Maeng. The fragrance opens deceptively sweet – like a cherry on a sundae: “so juicy you’ll want to lick your wrists.” It quickly turns mischievous, unfurling into a sharp bite of sour cherry, climaxing with ripe strawberry, atop a creamy vanilla base. Maeng explains how this deliberate inversion of cherry challenges conventional femininity: “Our cherry is not like any other cherry. It is a dark femininity: no flirting, no escape. As a Korean, we are always told to behave, to be innocent and pure. This rebels against what it is told. It’s openly explicit, with no intention of playing innocent.”

Today’s reinterpretation of cherry speaks to a broader cultural shift – from passively consuming nostalgia to actively reshaping it to speak to the present. Why cling to illusions of the past when we have the power to create something new?

Cherry perfumes are everywhere right now. From viral TikToks to noisy perfume counters, their sweet, sickly scent feels impossible to escape, with new releases like Room 1015’s Cherry Punk, New Notes’s Latte di Cherry and Kayali’s LoveFest Burning Cherry joining old classics like Tom Ford’s Lost Cherry. But today’s cherry is not the innocent scent we once knew, darker, boozier, smokier and more complex – a revealing insight into our shifting desires. But what’s fueling this obsession and what does it say about our collective psyche?

Cherries evoke the idealised, unattainable feminine: flirty, enticing, just out of reach. They are steeped in the subtly taboo – think: Audrey Horne knotting a cherry stem with her tongue on Twin Peaks; Katy Perry tasting cherry chapstick when she kisses a girl and likes it; Angelina Jolie slurping a maraschino in Girl, Interrupted on day release from a psychiatric institution. Cherry perfumes exist in this space of artificial fantasy. What we think of as cherry is not the fruit you’d pluck from a tree but saccharine, shiny and plasticky; these scents bear little resemblance to the actual fruit.

The revival of cherry perfumes feels timely in an age drunk on nostalgia, coinciding with the sticky persistence of two trends: the remnants of Y2K aesthetics and the rise of “tradwife” ideals. Seemingly opposite, both are hyper-feminine fantasies of a simpler time that never existed, conveniently sweeping the realities of those eras under the table. When the present feels unstable, we yearn for the comfort of an illusionary past and the familiarity of super-sweet gourmand scents like cherry can offer comforting escapism.

Writer Arabelle Sicardi – an expert on the intersection of beauty, technology and power – highlights the troubling connection between the rise of such fragrances and other auspices of hyperfemininity in the current political climate: “It’s a bit unsettling considering it’s happening alongside the rise of conservative politics and regression of women’s reproductive health.” Cherries, Sicardi explains, have long represented femininity and fertility across different cultures and religions. Yet Sicardi suggests that cherries’ inherent complexity holds the potential for more interesting stories. “There’s over 1,000 cherry variations, and so many ways to interpret the scent – the tartness, the acidity, the juice, the colour. Just like there’s many ways to be a girl.”

This opens space for subversive fragrances that defy traditional gender norms. Sicardi highlights Primal Yell from Amphora Parfum, which uses cherry as a top note but adds bitter almond (a nod to Dior Poison and cyanide’s bitter taste) and hot iron as an opener. “Rather than being cloying and sickly sweet, like an artificial cherry medicine, it’s a deeply feminine, vampiric rage.”

Cherries carry contradictions, embodying both innocence and lust. On screen, cherry pie often symbolises a Lynchian darkness; trouble bubbling beneath the facade of white-picket suburbia. Agent Cooper savors a slice while investigating the murder of a homecoming queen in Twin Peaks; Betty Applewhite claims she’s baking cherry pie to excuse bloodstains in Desperate Housewives. Cherry evokes unnerving perfection – the diner waitress with a grin stretched too wide. This duality is mirrored in the fruit itself. Cherry pits contain amygdalin, which can turn into cyanide when chewed, while benzaldehyde – the compound that gives cherry perfumes their almond-like scent – is used in embalming, leading to viral comparisons of cherry perfumes to the smell of cadavers. By exploring cherry’s darker undertones, perfumers tap into our cultural fascination with beauty meeting danger.

Perfumers today lean into this tension, pushing cherry into darker, stranger territories. These fragrances lure us with a familiar sweetness, only to unravel into something unsettling, exposing nostalgia as a veneer masking darker undercurrents. The cherry pie on the windowsill may still beckon us, but today’s perfumers spike it with a poison that demands we taste the past more critically.

At London’s Bloom Perfumery, customers often pick cherry when they want sweetness, but with more bite than your typical vanilla. Bloom’s ‘Charming Cherries’ sample pack includes Sly John’s Lab’s Cherry Passion (“memories of Bakewell tarts”), alongside boozier iterations of cherry that contrast the sweetness against deeper, sultry bases. Kirsch by Headspace for example, (“the perfect leathery cherry liqueur”), pairs cherry with notes of leather, rum, oakmoss and sake. Meanwhile, Born Screaming by Toskovat sees cherry in bed with saliva and latex, intended to “evoke a French dance troupe growing dizzy on a communal bowl of LSD spiked sangria.” On Toskovat’s website, the perfume’s notes include “Energy Drink, DVD Case, Smoke, Popped balloon, Adult Toys, Pearl necklace”.

Indecent Cherry by the South Korean brand BORNTOSTANDOUT is “for those who’ve perfected the innocent smile with a devilish glow in their eye,” according to BORNTOSTANDOUT’s Brand Manager Kris Maeng. The fragrance opens deceptively sweet – like a cherry on a sundae: “so juicy you’ll want to lick your wrists.” It quickly turns mischievous, unfurling into a sharp bite of sour cherry, climaxing with ripe strawberry, atop a creamy vanilla base. Maeng explains how this deliberate inversion of cherry challenges conventional femininity: “Our cherry is not like any other cherry. It is a dark femininity: no flirting, no escape. As a Korean, we are always told to behave, to be innocent and pure. This rebels against what it is told. It’s openly explicit, with no intention of playing innocent.”

Today’s reinterpretation of cherry speaks to a broader cultural shift – from passively consuming nostalgia to actively reshaping it to speak to the present. Why cling to illusions of the past when we have the power to create something new?