I was having a glance at the fragrance subreddit when I saw a post declaring the Mrs. Meyer’s Fall Leaves hand soap a “$5 Philosykos dupe.” Reader, I never clicked buy so fast.
I’m a longtime fan of Mrs. Meyer’s for my kitchen and bathroom hand soap1. I thought Radish, a peppery breath of fresh air, was the best. Then came Tomato Leaves, a delicious leafy, green Earthy aroma, and it was somehow even better. But Fall Leaves might be the best of all. As u/rollk1 declared, it’s a creamy, woody fig scent that punches well above its $5 price tag.
So why the fuck is it called “Fall Leaves”? An insipid name that calls to mind syrupy pumpkin spice lattes at worst, or maybe a Margiela Autumn Vibes dupe at best. Also in the Mrs. Meyer’s fall line-up are the scents “Acorn Spice” and “Apple Cider.” Maybe those are their take on pumpkin spice, but I wouldn’t know as I haven’t smelled them, and I don’t care to. Unless they are also some hidden gems a la Fall Leaves, but you wouldn’t know from how Mrs. Meyer’s is marketing almost all of them with some variation on the theme “spicy.”
I don’t know what goes on at Mrs. Meyer’s HQ. They are not very available to speak; when I reached out to them when writing about the proliferation of tomato scents in the mainstream market for Glossy earlier this year, they told me they “don’t normally have a spokesperson from Mrs. Meyer’s unless we’re working with a celeb or influencer as a spox.” I would have to imagine that, as it’s owned by SC Johnson, they have some market research team that is triangulating all the scent trends as they trickle down from niche to mainstream, such as happened with tomato leaf.
Fig has more than arrived at that inflection point. By 2025 you can get a figgy perfume at Target’s bargain priced Fine’ry line and in a Bath & Body Works body splash, but L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Premier Figuier helped kick off the trend for fig in niche perfumery all the way back in 1994. Diptyque launched Philosykos just two years later; both are made by Olivia Giacobetti, so it’s hard to say if Diptyque copied L’Artisan as much as it plucked Olivia to make a similar hit for them.
Fig has appeared in countless scents since the ‘90s, but it really reached critical, or at least internet, mass in D.S. & Durga’s Debaser, which leans into the milky, creamy aspects of the fruit with an injection of coconut milk. Debaser first hit the market in 2015, but it’s become a TikTok favorite in the 2020s. And there’s been countless other mainstream and niche fig creations of the 2020s — I mean Phlur launched Father Figure back in 2023, a brand made in a market research lab if there ever was one. Many of those recent fig launches sit somewhere on the spectrum between creamy and green or stemmy. David Seth Moltz, the “D.S.” of D.S. & Durga, offered a succint explanation for why that is on his brand’s TikTok.
So Mrs. Meyer’s is finally on the fig train. And yet they’re hiding their light under a bushel. Under a pile of fall leaves, if you will. If you go to the Mrs. Meyer’s website and scroll their infographics you’ll find they describe Fall Leaves as “woody, fresh and lightly sweet.” That barely tells me anything, and no one besides me is going to go through the trouble to find this description. It’s not Mrs. Meyer’s fault that any “fall” related scent or flavor has been coopted into pumpkin spice nonsense, but it is the world we live in and Mrs. Meyer’s does this scent a disservice by folding it into such a category. But maybe the fall collection team just really needed a fourth scent and said let’s roll with this one and stick some autumnal packaging on it. Who am I to say.
But now that I know about it, Fall Leaves does fill a necessary void in the Mrs. Meyer’s lineup, or at least in mine. Radish seems to be no longer; I never see it in any of my grocery stores or bodegas and the Mrs. Meyer’s website only lists a multi-surface cleaner in the scent. Tomato Leaves is a seasonal scent that I’ll have to wait until summer to find again. But Fall Leaves is here, for now.
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