Yves Saint Laurent Perfumes & Colognes

Twenty-eight bottles, and the first house on this site that is genuinely split down the middle: seventeen listed under men’s, eleven under women’s. It is also the house where reading the name on the bottle matters most, because YSL rarely releases a fragrance only once.

A couture house that took three years to make a perfume

Yves Saint Laurent opened his couture house in Paris in 1961 with Pierre Bergé. The first fragrance, simply called Y, followed in 1964. Rive Gauche came in 1971 and Opium in 1977, the latter sold with the line “For those addicted to Yves Saint Laurent” — a piece of copywriting that caused enough offence to become the best advertising the house ever had.

Saint Laurent himself died in 2008, the same year L’Oréal took the licence for the fragrance and cosmetics side, which it still holds. So the clothes and the perfume have been run by different companies for well over a decade — worth knowing when a designer name is on a bottle.

How to read a YSL name

Most of what is here belongs to one of four men’s families, and the suffix usually tells you the strength rather than a different scent:

• Y — six versions, the largest family on this page: Y, Y Elixir, Y Intense, Y Live Intense, Y Eau Fraîche and the Eau de Toilette. The name the house started with in 1964 is still the one it leans on hardest.
• L’Homme — four: Parfum Intense, Eau de Parfum, Eau de Toilette and Cologne Bleue.
• La Nuit de L’Homme — three: L’Intense, Le Parfum and the original Eau de Toilette.
• MYSLF — two, the newest arrival: MYSLF and L’Absolu.

If you already own one and want more of the same, move within its family. If you want something different, move between them — Y and La Nuit de L’Homme are not near neighbours.

The women’s side

Black Opium is the anchor, with Black Opium Neon alongside it. Mon Paris runs to three — the original, Floral and Couture. Libre, Manifesto and Elle stand on their own. All of it also sits under .

The survivors, and they are the cheapest things here

Four fragrances on this page were released before most of the others existed, and they are still in production: Rive Gauche (1971), Opium (1977), Kouros (1981) and Paris (1983). They are also, oddly, the least expensive things YSL sells here.

That is worth a moment. A fragrance that has stayed in production for forty or fifty years has done so on merit, not marketing — nobody is running campaigns for Kouros. If you want to understand what a designer house smells like at its best rather than at its newest, start there.

For designer fragrance at similar money, Giorgio Armani and Dior are the closest comparisons we stock. Everything above is also listed under men’s cologne, and this guide covers choosing by family rather than by name.