The Beat Burberry perfume – a fragrance for women 2008

I’ve worn Burberry The Beat ever since high school. I remember I used to read piles and piles of beauty magazines — Seventeen, Teen Vogue, Glamour, Grown-Up Vogue, Cosmo Girl, Cosmo *ahem* Woman, etc. They were always loaded with perfume samples. I would smell dozens of them every month, and I decided to pick a perfume this way. After peeling open many an offensive sample page, I arrived at a scent I kept coming back to — The Beat. I remember the ad with the very model Agyness Deyn looking super chic. In a sea of terrible weak florals and many pages that smelled the same, The Beat had it all– it seemed fresh and young, feminine yet not lilting or demure. I recently learned Blake Lively was supposedly a fan (how’s that for a callback to the late aughts Gossip Girl era?). The Beat was The One.

As my birthday approached, I dragged my dad up to the fragrance counter at Macy’s and demanded a bottle. It smelled different on me than it did on the page, but not to its detriment. The freshness of the bergamot and orange hit me, then the fresh spiciness of the pink pepper and cardamom. The top notes eased into a purple floral base of zen tea and iris. Eventually, the woody notes take over, leaving musk and cedar. I had to have it, and it quickly became my signature scent through my junior and senior year of high school and continuing to my freshman and sophomore years of college. Everyone else seemed to be wearing Ralph Lauren Ralph, DKNY Be Delicious, Bath and Body Works Warm Vanilla Sugar, and Britney Spears’ Fantasy at the time, so I felt very singular wearing this fresh/woody scent. I wore this stuff almost exclusively from 2008-2012, then switched to other frags, then largely ceased to wear perfume in my doctoral program, thinking it made me seem unserious. The Beat is the only fragrance I used an entire bottle of, and had to buy more of.

2020 has brought about a perfume and fragrance revival for me–after years of going frag-less, I’ve smelled hundreds of perfumes over the past few months. After almost a decade of dormancy, I brought out The Beat once more. You know how Taylor Swift sang, “I knew everything when I was young?” That’s how I feel about this perfume. I can still wear this teenage fragrance as an adult, it’s so good. It still doesn’t smell like anything else from that era. I cant comment on the reformulations of recent years, as my two bottles are from about a decade ago. After a long break from the world of fragrance, I still find myself bopping to The Beat.