MYSLF Eau de Parfum.

MYSLF arrived in 2023 as YSL Beauty Men's first woody-floral fragrance, a deliberate collision of two worlds that don't always play nice together. The name itself says everything: MYSLF is a contraction of 'myself,' stripped of pretense, built for the man who refuses a single definition. Three perfumers, Christophe Raynaud, Antoine Maisondieu, and Daniela Andrier, composed it with a single mandate: express modern masculinity as something fluid, contradictory, and unapologetic. Bergamot from Calabria opens it. Tunisian orange blossom absolute owns the heart. Indonesian patchouli and ambroxan anchor the base. The bottle, a black lacquered monolith with the YSL Cassandre logotype embedded in glass, holds it all. What makes the heart unusual is its rawness.

What makes the heart unusual is its rawness. Orange blossom absolute is typically handled gently in masculine compositions, softened, hedged, made to apologize for existing. Here, the YSL perfumers left it beating. It's heady and unapologetic, carrying a slight animalic warmth that most brands strip out when targeting men. The ambroxan adds a mineral, almost salt-like depth that elevates the patchouli into something cleaner and more textured than a standard earth note. The combination is quietly radical: it smells expensive without smelling safe.

The opening is bright and citrussy, Calabrian bergamot at its most alive, with just enough leaf-green to keep it from reading like a cleaning product. Thirty minutes in, the bergamot pulls back and the orange blossom absolute takes over completely. This is the phase people either love or can't get past. It projects hard for about two hours, filling a moderate radius with a warm, slightly indolic floral that most masculine fragrances would never risk. As it enters the drydown, the ambroxan and Indonesian patchouli arrive to ground everything. The patchouli is clean, almost paper-like against the mineral ambroxan, not the dirty earth of 90s masculines. The whole thing settles close to skin by hour five, intimate rather than announced. On fabric, the patchouli holds longer, closer to eight hours.

MYSLF won Fragrance of the Year, Men's Prestige at the Fragrance Foundation Awards in 2024. Backed by YSL's campaign with actor Austin Butler, the fragrance made its mark on the prestige men's market. The orange blossom heart makes this divisive, aggressive in its floral warmth. That's the point, and if that throws you, this isn't the ride.