Lancôme Over The Top Review: Green, Bright, Modern

For the better part of a decade, the fragrance industry has been eating its vegetables. Tomato leaf, fig leaf, basil, rhubarb, even pea have migrated from the farmers' market to the perfumer's organ, riding a broader cultural swing away from sugar-drenched gourmands and toward something greener, cleaner, more alive. Call it garden-to-bottle: a reaction to the vanilla-industrial complex, an extension of the farm-to-table ethos, and a quiet flex by perfumers who would rather evoke a rain-soaked allotment than a bakery counter. Most of that energy has come from niche and indie houses. What makes Lancôme Over The Top notable is that it arrives from one of the most commercially powerful names in French beauty — and it arrives without apology. This is not a softened, focus-grouped green. It opens with a genuinely bitter, sappy tomato leaf accord, threads it with jasmine absolute, and settles into a clean, softly woody base. It is a cologne in structure and a statement in tone. Released in 2025 and composed by master perfumer Carlos Benaïm, Over The Top sits inside Lancôme's long-running Ô collection — the citrus-cologne family that began with Ô de Lancôme in 1969 and later spun out into Ô Oui! and Ô de L'Orangerie. Where those leaned bright, sunny and orange-blossom pretty, Over The Top leans vegetal, mineral and slightly wild. It is the Ô for people who keep a herb garden on the balcony and a linen shirt on standby.