Sunset Hour by Goldfield & Banks became the scent of a generation for the kind of girls who never met a sunset they didn’t photograph. Inspired by Broome’s famously cinematic West Australian skies, it bottled that fleeting moment when the light turns everything gold.
So, when the perfumers announced a sequel to the scent that regulars have had on loop since 2023, the reaction was reminiscent of the kind of low-grade panic reserved for hearing your favourite TV series about the friendship (and sex lives) of four fashionable New York-based women is getting a rebrand. Hopefulness. Then the fear that disappointment is imminent. We’ve all sat through three seasons of Just Like That. We know how this can go.
Friends, I can confirm: it’s fine. It’s better than fine, actually. It’s the work colleague who got a little more interesting after their situationship ended. This is less “unnecessary reboot” and more The Devil Wears Prada Part II. The sequel nobody was worried about until it turned out to be the better film all along.
Goldfield & Banks Sunset Hour Dark Peach, out now at Sephora Australia, takes the original’s Broome-inspired glow and pushes it about four hours later into the night – past the point where you’d still call it golden hour, into the part of the evening where someone has opened a second bottle of something and nobody’s checking the time. If Sunset Hour captured the magic of the Kimberley’s blazing orange skies just before dusk, Dark Peach imagines what comes after: warm skin, salty air and the inevitable suggestion of “one more drink.”
The opening is deceptively bright – mandarin, a burst of pink berries. And for about ninety seconds you think, okay, this is just Sunset Hour with better lighting – a soft reboot, not a sequel. Then the rum note arrives, and it’s less “tropical cocktail” and more “the specific warmth of skin that’s been in the sun too long,” which sounds unhinged to type out but tracks the second you smell it. It’s boozy without being sticky, which is a needle very few “gourmand” fragrances manage to thread; most either smell like a cocktail bar floor or like dessert. This smells like neither, which is somehow the whole point.
By the time it settles, you’re in vanilla-and-tonka-bean territory, with a woody amber base doing the heavy lifting underneath – the kind of drydown that reads less “sweet” and more “warm skin, expensive candle, the last person to leave the party.” A touch of ginger keeps it from tipping into cloying, the way a good bartender keeps a drink from being too sweet by adding something sharp at the end.
Is it a “date night” scent? Sure, technically. But its real skill is making a Tuesday feel like it got a glow-up- the kind of energy Bridget Jones only found in the second film, once she’d stopped apologising for herself. At $54 for the 10ml and $280 for the full 100ml, that’s either an extremely reasonable ask or an extremely expensive form of self-delusion, depending on your read of the current economy. I’d argue it’s worth it. My bank account would like it on the record that it disagrees.
The verdict: If Sunset Hour captured Broome’s famous sunsets in a bottle, Dark Peach is everything that happens once the sun finally disappears below the horizon. Proof, like all the best sequels, that going darker doesn’t mean going worse. Wear it somewhere the lighting is bad, and the conversation is good.