Perfume Culture Is Starting to Stink

At the beginning of this year, I sent myself on a sniffing safari. I saw my 30s approaching from a not-so-distant horizon and concluded it was finally time to acquire some sophistication. My resolution for 2025 was to get into perfume. I tiptoed up to neat displays at tiny boutiques in Williamsburg and Nolita. I settled into a contemplative pose meant to convey to sales associates, I am not one of those Bath & Body Works chumps. I picked up bottles. I spritzed. I vacuumed dozens of finely tuned aromas up my nostrils, one by one.

I spent the better part of January with my wrist to my nose, as if stemming the world’s longest nosebleed. I wasn’t alone in my obsession. Perfume has rebranded and gone mainstream, simultaneously more accessible and rarefied than ever before. It seems to promise everything: transport to far-flung imaginaries and also closer relationships to our bodies; intellectual provocation and instant gratification; trendiness and individuality. I was getting with the times, a cultural moment when everyone is getting into smell — discussing “olfactory ethics” on X; buying $70 scented candles — while furiously trying to avoid smelling like everyone. Heaven forbid you’re still wearing Santal 33.

I’ve been trying to get into fragrance since 2022, doubling down this year as I anticipate the industry’s peak. I thought it would be easy. A former indie-music critic, I’m already trained to hunt for esoterica and wrench meaning from abstraction. Plus, perfume just sounded fun. But over a hundred scents and a few credit-card swipes later, all I’m ultimately left with is the feeling that our society is deeply unwell.

Fragrance is the fastest-growing category in beauty, and the industry could grow from $30 billion to $50 billion by 2030, according to conservative estimates. Specialty concoctions come pouring in from luxury-fashion houses (Fendi, Balmain), direct-to-consumer online retailers (Snif, Phlur), unisex millennial-and-under lines (DedCool, BoySmells), and daring solo artisans (Marissa Zappas, Hilde Soliani). They’re commissioned by film studios and mass-market food brands: Hellmann’s mayo, Pepsi, and Miller High-Life all released limited-edition colognes, some of which resell for three times the original price. Craving Auntie Anne’s? Try Knead: Eau de Pretzel. Wish to eject yourself from Earth? Tough luck, but consider Eau de Space. If money is tight, there are dupes aplenty. Even Walmart stocks a copycat of Baccarat Rouge 540.

The tides started shifting during the pandemic in 2020, which trapped people in a state of monkish isolation, retinas fried by screens. Global perfume sales soared as consumers sought sensory stimulation and self-soothed with retail therapy. “It was the $300 and the $400 fragrances that were doing phenomenal,” an analyst for the market-research firm Circana told the Washington Post in 2024, speaking to the lengths to which consumers would go for creature comforts. The narrative surrounding perfume evolved: What was once a rarefied luxury became a spiritually necessary step in a self-care routine. As consumers developed familiarity with the industry, their collections evolved, and so did their tastes. “People used to be like, ‘Oh my God, who wants to smell like dirt,’ whereas now they’re like, ‘What’s your favorite petrichor fragrance?’” says San Francisco–based perfumer Yosh Han.

The main target of the perfume industry is Gen Z. According to the most recent report by Circana, 83 percent of zoomers use fragrance, many at least three times a week. Even “smellmaxxxing” tween boys arrive to homeroom drenched in designer cologne, influenced by Jeremy Fragrance, the German social-media personality and self-identified “No. 1 fragrance icon that follows the teachings of Jesus.” (He has 10 million followers on TikTok.) Two weeks ago, on an Instagram Reel, I watched a young boy review Maison Margiela’s imitation of a private Brooklyn jazz club. “Ooh, that’s brilliant,” he exclaimed. He was British and looked to be approximately 8 years old.

The concept of the signature scent has been phased out for the “scent wardrobe,” aromas for every mood, identity, and occasion. “Fragrance is tied into the search for something that makes you you,” says beauty and fashion writer Viv Chen. “It’s one of those things, like bag charms, which is very connected to individual storytelling.” You contain multitudes, the wisdom goes, and so should your collection.

On #PerfumeTok, which influences a whopping 66 percent of Gen Z’s purchases, creators invent opulent mood boards and personality archetypes to help audiences imagine scents through the screen: Here are the five perfumes for “weird girls.” Try this if you want to give “dark academia” vibes. “We really lean into these dramatic, often long-winded descriptions of perfumes because it’s what sets the scene,” Emilia O’Toole, TikTok’s @professorperfume, explained to Business Insider. As more people shop online, perfume branding has increasingly become an exercise in world-building. Descriptions read like museum wall text or the jacket copy of novels. “In 1980, Gwen K. Vroomen quit her monotonous job in Dearborn, Michigan, went to the corner bar, and — on the bartender’s urging — threw a dart at a world map tacked on the wall,” begins a flash-fiction scent synopsis by the perfume brand Imaginary Authors, which takes its storytelling mandate literally. (Vroomen ends up “celebrating Hindu New Year at a tea garden high in the hills of Kerala.”) Epigraphs, poems, playlists, and historical research round out the immersive experience. At the same time, fragrances have been absorbed into brand universes, the latest trend in movie and book marketing. Custom perfumes stir excitement for “It”-girl book launches and films like Nosferatu.

This content reaches beyond Gen Z. “I’ll see someone do a review, and I’ll be like, Oh, I’ve got to try that,” says Anna Viele, a 51-year-old marketing professional from Orange County, California. Online retailers like Scent Split, which decants full-size bottles of perfume and divides their contents into smaller, travel-size containers, make it easy to sample widely at a fraction of the price. Each month, Viele orders approximately one Scent Split decant, plus a discovery set from a brand. After wearing the same perfume for 15 years, she has “about 400” scents at her disposal.

These include a bin of rejects, ordered online, that Viele has no desire to smell again but can’t bring herself to discard. She reasons that they might be useful for her education down the line. “When I’m trying to identify notes, I might pick out a perfume I don’t really like but know has, like, pomegranate in it. And then it’ll help me discern,” she says. Life would be easier if she had a community: “We could pool resources.” She doesn’t need to own everything.

The sheer number of new perfume releases can be exhausting. “Some people within the community are getting just so burned out,” says TikTok fragrance creator Jean the Perfume Queen. Chen wonders whether the novelty will wear off: “In two years, is anyone going to be like, I’m wearing this scent every day. It’s the Nosferatu collab?” But for now, the industry shows no signs of slowing down. Givaudan, a leading global fragrance manufacturer, recently unveiled a Roblox game called Guardians of Memory. The multinational corporation has been bullish about AI, which will only accelerate the speed of production. A representative called it “a large pillar of what we do.” There are already multiple ChatGPTs for perfume.

In 2022, Alex Wiltschko, then a scientist at Google Research, founded the AI scent start-up Osmo. In an open letter from 2023, he sketches a vision of the future in which computers can detect cancer while inventing new sustainable ingredients for laundry detergent and perfume: “Giving machines a sense of smell means giving everyone a chance at a better life, and we have to mount an all-out attack on this challenge.” One January morning, I visited Osmo’s New York offices in Kips Bay, where CTO Rich Whitcomb explained the company’s aspirations. “The hope with AI is, well, yes, you might be copied,” he says, responding to my concern that their technology would be used to dupe already-popular products. “But you also might end up with an entirely new type of fragrance no one has ever seen before.”

A few months ago, Osmo launched a public tool called Inspire, which allows anyone to generate fragrance formulas from words and images. I asked Whitcomb to feed it Picasso’s Guernica, and it spit out “Nocturne Chaos,” a smoky oud scent that evokes “the endless dance between darkness and light.” A month later, a sample arrived at my apartment renamed “Chaotic Resistance.” It smelled like alcohol with a little lavender — in other words, not very Guernica at all.

Osmo’s major accomplishment thus far has been figuring out how to “teleport” scents. In a conference room, Whitcomb handed me a small vial of “Plum 1.0.” A grocery-store plum had been pulverized and heated, its aromatic molecules scanned by a machine that generated a list of chemicals. A fridge-size robot then assembled the final product from 1,000 available ingredients in Osmo’s lab. I unscrewed the vial’s cap, and the scent hit instantly. It had a hyperconcentrated flavor, like a Haribo gummy, but the sour tang of the peel added an element of realism. Osmo has also tried to teleport herbs, pizza, and bagels, with varying success. Currently, it is attempting to replicate human scent with worn clothing: “We have a lot of babies coming through Osmo, so we’re trying to capture the scent of a baby,” Whitcomb says. In the future, you could forward the smell of your newborn to Grandma.

The idea of a bottled skin scent may be disturbing, but it is a perfect representation of a capitalist system in which corporations profit by selling our personal data back to us. As the tech industry seeks to colonize every bit of human existence, it appeases consumers by offering to share the evidence; now we track our sleep patterns with Oura rings and post our Spotify Wrapped results on Instagram. The point of teleportation is to print out copies of experiences — perfumes like Margiela’s Replica Jazz Club or Miller High-Life’s Dive Bar cologne fulfill virtually the same end. The difference is that Osmo has automated the process. While perfume collectors amass olfactory facsimiles of moments and places, elements of the world we know slowly vanish. Natural ingredients like vanilla fall prey to climate change; cities homogenize as gentrification turns old neighborhood haunts into Aesops.

Perfume has always been sold as a kind of transport, whisking you to other locations, but its destinations have gotten so specific. With one spritz, fragrances promise, you can travel across the continent to the Mojave Desert, back in time to Stonewall, or into the haunted recesses of a stranger’s mind. At the same time, any identity is now on the table instead of just a more glamorous, confident you: A seahorse undulating in coral, for example, or a “fat” electrician languishing in New Jersey.

Fragrances like Etat Libre d’Orange’s Fat Electrician pervert the idea that smell can promote empathy, drawing attention to overlooked people and experiences. “I’ve gotten into all-caps screaming matches with Swedish brands that don’t understand that some reference to [the Vietnam War] and napalm is really bad,” says Han, who’s also the founder of the Decolonize Scent initiative, referring to 19-69’s Chinese Tobacco. A half-century after the release of YSL’s Black Opium, the enduring shamelessness of what Han calls “passport bro imagery” leaves her less room to care about “marginally appropriative, but at least correctly attributed” fragrances like like Marissa Zappas’s Ching Shih, a homage to the Qing Dynasty pirate warrior. I find the perfume, which smells to me like Chinese herbal medicine, racially uncomfortable to wear. But beyond that, I can’t really evaluate it; I don’t have a Ph.D.

Often, the details of a perfume don’t seem to matter as long as they bring about the feeling of intellectual conquest. What is there to glean about “Africa” from Byredo’s Bal d’Afrique, which celebrates “the way [Africa’s] myriad cultures have shaped dance, art, and music”? Or Romani culture from “Gypsy Water,” its title a slur, which evokes “the fever of gypsy nights”? (Byredo did not respond to my request for comment about the perfume’s name.) D.S. & Durga advertises that its perfumes are “authentic studies of real-world objects, plants, and places.” I ran to Google after reading the grave informational text for D.S. & Durga’s Burning Barbershop — “A fire broke out in the Curling Bros. barbershop in Westlake, N.Y., in 1891” — only to find out that the referenced tragedy had never happened. It’s just a story perfumer David Moltz made up during the late 2000s.

Despite these scholarly conceits, a large part of the fragrance industry seems to view edification as an added bonus, not itself a priority. Commerce is the goal. During my self-directed sniff expedition in January, I was perturbed by the casual hostility of nearly every boutique I walked into: The inescapable surveillance by jumpy salespeople with nowhere else to roam, the awkward bureaucracy having to solicit tester cards, rationed like diagnostic kits during peak COVID. It’s as if they were designed to discourage exploration. There are so few spaces for scent-curious people to just learn.

One afternoon, I toured the Aftel Archive for Curious Scents on Google Street View while its founder, Mandy Aftel, the legendary 76-year-old natural perfumer, guided me over Zoom. Located in a converted garage in Berkeley, California, the Aftel Archive is the first perfume museum in America. Every Saturday, people from all over the world pay the $25 entry fee to explore exhibitions on ingredients like musk, rare books, and centuries-old botanicals. “It’s a very diverse group, and because they’re not being marketed to, their thirst for education is unbelievable,” Aftel tells me. Visitors are given gloves, tester strips, and scent wheels; they are encouraged to touch. Aftel later leads them to her flower garden, where she breaks down her own formulas.

We are living in what some call “the anti-social century,” increasingly isolated from others and the material world. Last year, Chen observed a cultural arc in which food is being compressed “from solids to liquids (think soylent, branded as a meal replacement) to gaseous (perfume when sprayed),” as she wrote on Substack. In the era of Ozempic, she speculated, gourmand perfumes could replace dessert. Already, the fashion and advertising worlds have turned food into fetish, serving up decadence without the calories. Croissant laundry detergent and restaurant-commissioned “pasta water” candles satisfy the same cultural craving. You think it’s bad, and then you realize edible perfumes already exist.

I’ve seen fragrance-heads on weight-loss medications begin to connect the dots on TikTok and Reddit. “Sometimes, I’d rather smell perfume than eat,” Kara McCalip Lang, a 44-year-old hairstylist in the Oklahoma City area, told me point-blank. After she started taking Mounjaro in November 2022, food no longer appealed to her. Fragrance filled the dopamine void. (Anna Viele, who started Mounjaro a few months earlier, said the same.) Lang would hear about a new release on PerfumeTok, head to T.J. Maxx, and buy without trying. She gravitated toward “weird scents” like Demeter Fragrance’s Earthworm — “It smells like wet forest floor,” she said — and Death of Floral’s Art School Dropout, which has notes of car exhaust, pencil shavings, and clay. Five perfumes became 300. Her co-workers think she’s crazy: “They’re like, You smell burnt.”

Lang told me about a time when she went to a bike shop with her husband, who was oblivious to its strange, rubbery aroma: “I kind of wanted to just bottle it up and give it to him.” She expressed hopes that a woman in her social circle who just started Mounjaro might become addicted to fragrances too. At the same time, her interest seemed to be waning. I asked her what she might do with her collection if she ever stops taking Mounjaro. She said she’s thought about it. Perhaps she’d sell them. “We live in a tornado area,” she explains. “And if a tornado got my perfumes, I don’t know if I would repurchase them.”