The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Guilty Pleasure enters the fragrance landscape as part of Hate Me Love Me's catalog, a brand whose name functions as its own provocation. Mike Arens composed Guilty Pleasure as a study in sweetness that refuses to behave, the kind of pleasure that knows it shouldn't feel this good. It isn't a fragrance for someone asking permission. It's a fragrance for someone who stopped asking a long time ago. The notes tell the rest: pineapple bright on top, nutmeg and rose pulsing through the heart, ambroxan and sandalwood carrying the after-hours weight. Nothing apologizes. Nothing hides. The composition lives in that tension between what registers as a crowd-pleaser on paper and what actually arrives on skin, something darker, warmer, and far less predictable than its top-note reading suggests.
What makes Guilty Pleasure interesting is the collision in its top notes. Pineapple sits opposite cardamom in a way that produces something unexpectedly bright, a fruity sharpness cut by a warmer, slightly resinous spice before either ingredient has time to settle into category. The result refuses to read as just fresh. The nutmeg-rose heart introduces another disruption: spice that's warm without aggression, florality that doesn't ask to be admired.
The evolution
The opening minutes are bright and almost deceptively easy. Pineapple and bergamot arrive sharp, the cardamom lurking underneath like a warning you don't yet understand. The citrus gives the composition its initial lift, while the pineapple provides a sweetness that feels more complex than candy, almost cooked, with a slight tartness at the edges. Then nutmeg cuts in, warm and slightly dirty, and the rose does something unexpected in a men's composition, it pushes forward instead of receding. Rose has a way of disappearing in masculine-leaning builds, but here it holds its ground, lending the heart a soft warmth that prevents the spice from becoming one-note. This is where Guilty Pleasure stops being what you expected. The woody base doesn't announce itself with fanfare. It just appears, ambroxan doing the heavy lifting, sandalwood giving it skin, cedar giving it backbone.
Cultural impact
Guilty Pleasure stakes out a specific corner of ambered-fruity perfumery, where sweetness and spice share the same sentence and neither one wins by default. It earns its name through composition rather than concept: the pineapple-cardamom opening delivers a brightness that feels indulgent rather than innocent, and the nutmeg-rose heart introduces a warmth that reads as intentional rather than accidental. The base brings ambroxan, sandalwood, cedar, and tonka into a drydown that anchors the earlier brightness in something heavier and more grown.
The House
Hate Me Love MeHate Me Love Me is an independent eau de parfum label that launched in 2022 with a debut collection centered on emotional duality. The brand positions each fragrance as a personal statement, with provocative names like Suicide Blonde, Urban Legend, Feel Good Lie, and Guilty Pleasure framing scent as a form of identity play rather than traditional perfumery. Operating in the niche fragrance space, the house releases compositions intended to read like olfactory confessions, designed for wearers who treat fragrance as narrative rather than accessory.
The Creator
Mike ArensArens writes about scent the way a sommelier speaks about wines, with vocabulary held loosely enough to admit surprise. He gravitates toward fragrances with clear structural logic and an identifiable signature accord, often highlighting leather, orris, tobacco, and aromatic he…
