EDITOR'S NOTE Good morning. Do you smell that? There must be something in the air, because in today's newsletter, we'll be taking a big whiff of all things olfactory—and the businesses that depend on tantalizing your nose. Whether you swear by your signature fragrance or swap out your scent as often as your socks, we hope you'll enjoy sniffing around with us. |
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BUSINESS Parents catching a whiff of tobacco on their teenager's clothes shouldn't worry too much about what their kiddo got up to last night…because it could just be a funky fragrance. In a boon to the fragrance industry, spritzing oneself with perfumes is now a Gen Z and millennial obsession. That's thanks to PerfumeTok, a corner of TikTok that popularized the necessity of enhancing one's odor using designer fragrances, called smellmaxxing. There's also scent layering, which is creating a signature musk by combining two or more aromatic products. This craze started during the pandemic, when stimulation-deprived folks were eager to activate the receptors in their nostrils as an alternative to binge-watching Tiger King. And it went into overcharge in recent years, drawing new customers into the scent fold. Teenage boys in particular are foregoing Axe spray for exquisite fragrance collections, with spending on perfumes in that demographic rising 26% between 2023 and 2024, according to the New York Times. And many young people are buying products without smell-testing, relying on recs from perfume influencers like Jeremy Fragrance, who has 10 million followers on TikTok. Overall, #perfumetok videos have racked up 9+ billion views. Perfumers cash in on the symphony of smells The bonanza represents a bright spot for luxury retail sales, which are largely in retreat amid a slowing global economy. But the likes of Dior, Chanel, and Tom Ford are now competing with rising indie brands. Niche perfume spending is projected to grow from $8.6 billion this year to $18.9 billion by 2033, according to Proficient Market Insights. To set themselves apart from incumbents, indie perfumers are promoting their concoctions on social media with an emphasis on creative authenticity. For instance, British perfume house Earl of East recently held a blind smell sesh with indie folk singer Bon Iver and designed a new scent with his responses, inspired by his latest album. And with perfumes increasingly viewed as a vehicle for expressing individuality, the market for edgy and anti-glamorous scents has exploded: - Perfumetoker Annabelle La Chimia runs the @ismellunusua account, where she features indie scents that match particular vibes. She told the New York Times that subscribers often ask her to recommend perfumes that smell like dead trees or water-stained motels, for example.
- UK-based Filigree & Shadow recently dropped the perfume Maggie's Last Party—a jab at the late PM Margaret Thatcher—with notes of latex, leather, party favors, poppers, tobacco, and used underwear, evoking a gay club darkroom aroma. (Her government passed laws that prohibited the "promotion of homosexuality.")
Meanwhile…beauty giants like Estée Lauder and L'Oreal have responded to the challenge from perfume upstarts by releasing their own limited edition scents and acquiring stakes in niche brands. There may be enough room for everyone: Globally, fragrance sales are projected to reach a record $60.7 billion in 2025, up from $57.3 billion last year, per Precedence Research.—SK | | |
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WORK Becoming a professional perfumer, or "nose," is like pursuing an arthouse version of medicine—it can take a decade of scientific training, and you also want the French to like you. Competition is fierce to be one of the hundreds of people in the world who can not only distinguish between the scents of different orange varieties but also splice smells into luxury fragrances like a chef creating a new recipe: - A lucky few were born into the perfume families of Grasse, France, which is known as the fragrance capital of the world. (Chanel's current nose—the son of its previous nose—hails from Grasse. As does the jasmine it uses in No. 5.)
- The conventional perfumery route usually requires a bachelor's degree in chemistry, a master's from one of France's three main perfume schools, and a multiyear program at a major fragrance manufacturer like Givaudan, where trainee acceptance rates can be less than 1%.
- Still, some perfumers manage to pave their own way. Barnabé Fillion, Aesop's in-house perfumer for 10 years, worked with a mentor instead of getting formal training. Self-taught sniffers are trying to leapfrog the traditional process altogether by launching their own indie perfume brands.
Common denominator: Fillion and many other perfumers—including Hermès's *checks notes* Director of Olfactive Creation Christine Nagel—experience synesthesia, a condition that makes it possible for some people to see, hear, and feel a scent. That comes in handy when the Aesop creative brief asks you to evoke a combination of soul music, Chinese poetry, and the color green. The sign of a good nose: avoiding obvious choices. Nagel opted for rhubarb over citrus for the notes of freshness in her first Hermès fragrance nearly 10 years ago.—ML | | |
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SCIENCE One beauty brand is making perfumes that won't smell familiar to anyone born after 1900. Future Society is a line of perfumes based on scents of extinct plants, developed via genetic sequencing by Boston-based biotech startup Arcaea. Science for beauty's sake The perfumery process that Arcaea calls "scent-surrection" may be what Coco Chanel would have devised if she had a PhD in genomics and botanical history: - With the help of genetic engineering company Ginkgo Bioworks, Arcaea sequences DNA from dried specimens of extinct plants stored in the Harvard University Herbaria. It isolates the genes responsible for scent to recreate the enzymes that gave the plants their distinct aromas.
- Pro perfumers then combine the reverse-engineered herbal scent with related smells—like earthy notes or flora from the same environment—to concoct the finished product.
So far, the collaboration has yielded six perfumes paying tribute to the long-lost plants. For instance, the Solar Canopy fragrance mixes the revived essence of the Hawaiian hibiscus flower Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, which vanished in 1912 due to deforestation, with hints of rose, lychee, and magnolia petals. But…Arcaea concedes that it can't be sure how accurately its perfumes replicate the extinct plants' smells, since the scent mechanisms of a flower are biologically complex and in many instances, no one is alive who would have remembered the scents.—SK | | |
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COPYCATS Luckily for anyone on a budget who wants to smell good, finding a smell-alike for an expensive perfume doesn't require purchasing anything from a guy on a street corner with a briefcase full of "Rolexes." Perfume dupes are easy to find both at stores and online—and there's little legal recourse for brands whose scents are getting ripped off. Consumers aren't feeling any shame about going for cheaper copies. The Financial Times reports: - On TikTok, where many people discover new scents, there are more than 25,000 videos labeled #perfumedupe and #perfumedupes.
- A survey of British consumers last year found that 32% were turning to product dupes as prices rose, with fragrances being among the most coveted.
No stopping the dupe train There's not much that big brands selling tiny $400 vials can do about it. Knock-off purveyors have the tech to make good copies. Many use gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to identify the specific molecules in a fragrance they're looking to copy. They may still use cheaper ingredients or get the balance wrong, but this gives them a solid starting point to replicate the scent. Intellectual property protection is scant for the scents themselves, which generally aren't considered enough of an invention to be patented. High-end perfumers can take legal action when the copycats use their trademarks or distinctive packaging (known as "trade dress" to the lawyers). However, most dupe-makers are now savvy enough to claim their scents are "inspired by" the original rather than the same, making it hard for brands to make a case. "In trademark, it all comes down to the question of whether the consumer is confused, and a consumer who is reading the message 'this smells like Tom Ford's Black Orchid but it's not' is not going to be confused," Susan Scafidi, the academic director of Fordham University's Fashion Law Institute, told the FT.—AR | | |
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TRAVEL Maybe the bespoke blend of tea and sandalwood reminds you of your summers following mother around the Four Seasons Maldives, or maybe your nostalgia is triggered by the odor of a chlorinated Holiday Inn Express pool. Wherever you fall on the vacation scent memory spectrum, the hotel where it was wafting probably did it on purpose. Luxury hotels have been ever-so-slightly pumping curated fragrances into lobbies, spas, and elevators for decades as a way to set the vibe for guests, force core memories, and make you want to return: - Each Ritz-Carlton property has a different scent.
- Edition, the luxury boutique hotel chain created by Marriott in partnership with Ian Schrager (the hotelier, Studio 54 co-founder, and pardon-receiver), has a signature scent with bougie French perfume company Le Labo. The chain says its black tea and bergamot aroma is meant to "invoke a sense of comfort and exoticism."
You can even bring the fragrance home Many high-end resorts and hotels, including Edition, package their scents and sell them in candles, diffusers, and bath products. It's not just high-end hotels. Super 8 briefly offered road-trip-themed candles in 2022 that included scents like gasoline and cherry slushie. Sets are still available on eBay. But…the biggest name in vacations isn't bottling their curated blends. Despite sleuthing Disney fans trying to identify scents from parks and resorts, there's no way to buy the brand's official smells. But there are plenty of dupes that carefully hint at or claim to be inspired by the House of Mouse.—MM | | |
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