Fugazzi Hema Review: A Fizzy Pear Extrait in Disguise

Some fragrances announce themselves with a price tag. Fugazzi Hema announces itself with a shrug — a small, unassuming 30 ml bottle, a high-street shelf, a number that reads more like a lipstick than a luxury extrait. And then you spray it, and the arithmetic stops making sense. Fugazzi, the Amsterdam-based house, has spent its short life doing something the industry finds faintly scandalous: making perfumery that behaves like niche and costs like mainstream. HEMA, for its part, is a Dutch institution — the kind of shop where a nation buys its birthday candles, its smoked sausage, and, evidently, its extrait de parfum. The pairing sounds like a joke until you smell the result. What Bram Niessink has built here is not a novelty gift. It is a genuinely wearable, genuinely modern woody-spicy composition that treats pear as a structural material rather than a garnish. Released in 2026 as a unisex extrait de parfum, Fugazzi Hema sits at the intersection of two very different worlds: the fizzy, fruit-forward accessibility of a designer bestseller, and the saffron-and-sandalwood seriousness of a niche oud-adjacent composition. It is bright where it could have been syrupy. It is dry where it could have been cloying. And at roughly €20 to €40 for 30 ml, it is one of the more interesting value propositions to cross my desk this year. It is not perfect. The Fragrantica community, sitting at a 3.81 out of 5, has been quick to point out the synthetic scaffolding beneath the pear, and the longevity, while respectable for the concentration, is not the stuff of legend. But perfection was never the point. The point is that this smells like a decision — a deliberate, opinionated piece of perfumery that happens to be sold next to the tea towels.