Victoria Beckham’s Hotel Portofino extrait de parfum, available from 9 September at $320 for 50ml, is not a fragrance about a holiday. It is a fragrance about what survives one. The scent is WWD‘s pick for one of the more commercially ambitious launches of the season, with industry sources estimating it could reach $20 million at retail in its first year.
The timing is deliberate. Victoria Beckham Beauty‘s first extrait de parfum marks the fifth collaboration between Beckham and Jérôme Epinette, master perfumer at Robertet, and arrives as a companion piece, and a counterargument, to Portofino ’97, the pair’s debut fragrance together, which drew from the 1997 trip to the Italian Riviera that Beckham and her husband David took in the early months of their relationship.
From Falling to Staying: What the Hotel Portofino Extrait de Parfum Actually Smells Like
Where Portofino ’97 traded in the bright, slightly vertiginous feeling of new romance, Hotel Portofino is interested in what comes after the vertigo settles. Beckham’s word for it is ‘intensity’. ‘Both stem from the same incredibly personal memory,’ she says. ‘Hotel Portofino is its own experience entirely though, with different ingredients. It’s about that moment when infatuation tips into something far more intense.’
The composition bears that out. It opens sunlit and green, bergamot and basil sharpened by a thread of saffron, before thickening in the heart through wild fig, agarwood and a pinot noir accord. The dry-down is where it commits: incense, papyrus and black amber, dark and resinous and, as Beckham was at pains to ensure, disinclined to leave before you do. ‘An extrait is a different level of craft,’ she says. ‘It lasts longer on the skin. Hours later you still get that hit of black amber and incense. Longevity was a non-negotiable for me.’
The extrait format, with its higher concentration of perfume oil, is a practical expression of the fragrance’s central argument: that love, in its more settled form, requires a certain determined presence. The olfactory equivalent, you might say, of sticking around.
The Bottle, the Brand, and the Business Behind It
The bottle reprises the fluted gold of its predecessor, paperweight-heavy and finished with a turquoise label that mirrors the colour of the Ligurian sea. Beckham is specific about the intention: ‘This one needed to feel like its own treasured object, something with real weight behind it that represented its intensity. The gold and the fluted detail have that vintage glamour, almost like something you would find tucked away in an old jewellery box. It felt right for a fragrance built around a memory I’ve held onto for so long.’
The jewellery box is not incidental. Beckham has spoken before about collecting empty perfume bottles for her dressing table as a girl, and there is something pleasingly circular about a woman who arranged other people’s empties on a childhood vanity now building an entire scent wardrobe of her own. ‘I’m always taking in scents and memories wherever I travel,’ she says. ‘You never know what will end up inspiring the next fragrance.’
The commercial context is considerable. Victoria Beckham Holdings Ltd. delivered its first operating profit in the fiscal year ended 31 December 2025, following double-digit sales gains across both fashion and beauty, according to WWD. A fragrance that industry sources suggest could add $20 million at retail in year one is not a peripheral experiment; it is load-bearing.
Epinette’s method, which Beckham describes with genuine admiration, remains rooted in feeling rather than formula. ‘I describe a feeling or memory to him and he somehow finds the ingredients that capture exactly that,’ she says. ‘I still find that process extraordinary every single time.’ Twenty-seven years on from a trip to Portofino, and five fragrances into a creative partnership, that process is apparently still working.
As for how she wears the finished thing: ‘It’s always instinctive, a bit like getting dressed. Hotel Portofino is the one I reach for in the evening, when I want a bit more depth. Fragrance is always the final step. I won’t leave the house without it.’ Hotel Portofino extrait de parfum is priced at $320 for 50ml and is available now at victoriabeckhambeauty.com.
