A novel approach to perturbed equations of state for simple fluids is presented and its advantages over the traditional perturbed hard sphere equations are demonstrated by its application to several model fluids. The approach is based on a short range Yukawa reference which incorporates, in addition to repulsive interactions, also attractive interactions at short separations. The considered models of common interest are the Sutherland, Lennard-Jones, and EXP6 fluids. It is shown that using the proposed approach the reference system captures a good deal of properties of the studied fluids and that an accurate equation of state can be obtained using only the crude mean field (augmented van der Waals) approach. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.