Everyone Wants to Smell Like SPF — Again

It’s sunny days indeed for the fragrance category these days.

That’s thanks to a slew of new sun care-inspired fragrances hitting the market, from Vacation’s trio of $24 body mists inspired by the scents of its existing SPF offerings, to Sun Bum’s Sonny No. 101 perfume, similarly launched this summer for $49.99 in the coconut-y scent of the brand’s Original SPF.

Billed as “smelling like the first day of summer,” Sun Bum’s fragrance generated a 10,000-person waitlist and sold out within three hours of its initial, limited-edition drop. According to the brand, customers had long been asking for a perfume bottling its signature SPF scent. (Indeed, a TikTok video uploaded in March by @pupkristiane, which garnered nearly a million views shared that the user had long been using Sun Bum’s SPF spray as a makeshift perfume.)

Vacation saw a 3,000-plus-person waitlist for its own body mist collection, which came in the scents of the brand’s chardonnay body oil, its after-sun aloe vera gel and its signature Vacation SPF spray, the scent of which was developed by perfumers Carlos Huber and Rodrigo Flores-Roux.

In a similar vein, Snif this month dropped a Spray Tan body mist, which retails for $28 and, as the name implies, is a tanning oil-inspired scent with notes of coconut, vanilla, banana flower and tiger lily. Elsewhere, clean fragrance brand Skylar rolled out a Scent-Screen SPF 30 mist in April inspired by beachside boardwalk signatures, such as cotton candy, marking the brand’s first SPF/perfume hybrid. Data from Trendalytics shows the launch drove a 566 percent increase in engagement to the brand’s Instagram profile in the days following.

This isn’t the first time people have wanted to smell like summer. In March 2002, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics introduced its Beach Eau de Parfum, $90, which tapped notes like sea spray, sand-jasmine and mandarin. In 2012, Maison Margiela Replica introduced its Beach Walk Eau de Toilette, featuring coconut milk, lemon and musk.

Today, the trend is more focused on lightweight formats like mists versus eaux de parfum, which tracks given the 94 percent sales growth prestige body sprays saw in 2024, per Circana, outpacing the 12 percent growth of prestige fragrance overall. These summer- and SPF-inspired scents also align with the rise of seasonal fragrance wardrobing, and tend to skew gender-neutral, both of which are growth areas for the fragrance category.