Dancing Light, Lake Como has won Excellence in Home Fragrance at the Attracta Beauty Awards 2026. The award, one of the Haute Beauty Awards presented at the ceremony on 8 July, comes a month after the Fragrance Foundation UK Awards in June, where the same fragrance was a finalist for Best Interior Fragrance. Two juries, two months, one fragrance. We are still catching up with it.
What was recognised
The Attracta Beauty Awards judge finished products on their merits, and Excellence in Home Fragrance is exactly the standard we set out to meet when Told London began: fine fragrance for the home built to the level of the perfume you wear, rooted in a real place and a real memory. That the winning fragrance is Dancing Light, our love letter to the lake we now call home, makes it the recognition we would have chosen if we had been allowed to choose.
The Fragrance Foundation finalist place in June was already more than an independent British house at this stage could expect. To follow it with a win, from a different jury, tells us the fragrance is landing with people who know what they are smelling.
The fragrance
Dancing Light was composed at Mastenbroek by Ruth and Nic Mastenbroek, mother and son, working together before Ruth passed the creative reins to Nic. We briefed them with a feeling rather than a list of notes: the light moving across Lake Como on a spring morning, wisteria over the old stone walls, star jasmine in the warm evening air. Fig leaf, honeysuckle and an aquatic accord open it cool and green. The heart unfolds into muguet, wisteria, magnolia and star jasmine. A base of musk, cedarwood and sandalwood gives it depth without weight. Freshness with presence, light that lasts.
It comes as a 300g candle, an 80g travel candle and a 200ml reed diffuser, in fine porcelain illustrated by Kerry Lemon with the wisteria, the villas, the Duomo and the swallows of the lake. The candle and the diffuser are refillable, because a vessel that carries a memory should be kept.
Thank you
To the Attracta Beauty Awards and their judges; to Ruth and Nic, who made it; to Kerry, who drew it; and to everyone who has lit it, we are grateful. Dancing Light was made to hold the feeling of arriving somewhere beautiful. It is a fine thing to have that feeling recognised twice in one summer.
Discover Dancing Light, Lake Como, or read the Fragrance Foundation finalist news from June. The full list of awards is on our Awards and Press page.
