How perfume found a devoted online audience in 2023

Recently, I used the word “sillage” at a dinner party, impressing someone so much in the process that they Googled the word to check I wasn’t lying. I have always been a slut for perfume; fascinated by how people choose to smell and obsessed with dissecting the notes of a fragrance. But this year, my love was kicked up a notch, as I, like so many of us, became Fragrantica-pilled by #PerfumeTok.

PerfumeTok, an elegant little corner of TikTok where creators share their addictively storied reviews of scents, has opened the floodgates for all the intensely-dedicated perfume lovers, collectors and experts to share their passion with the world. It’s become a big success this year, not only racking up almost six billion views online but also commercially disrupting the fragrance category offline, bestowing popularity and success to both niche and mainstream scents and turning viral discourse into cold hard cash. 

Perfume brands have been seeing exponential growth, with Dior, YSL, Prada and Valentino reporting double-digit sales increases in the last year. It’s not just the mainstream brands either – L’Oréal shelled out $2.5 billion for hipster restaurant bathroom favourite Aesop just a year after conglomerate Puig purchased a majority stake in “emotion-led” indie brand Byredo. Amid a recession and while all other areas of beauty have reported a decrease in sales, the perfume industry has grown nine per cent and is predicted to be valued at £58 billion worldwide.

Fragrance never truly goes out of style, but scent trends and the way we buy and think about perfume ebbs and flows as culture shifts. The early 2000s were dominated by famous fragrances in the age of celebrity worship – think Britney Spears Fantasy and Glo by J.Lo – a market which then became so saturated it was inevitably deemed uncool. In reaction, the late 2010 brought an age of scent sophistication, as niche and independent with minimalist aesthetics took over. By the time we reached the 2020s, we craved personalisation. The era of skin scents began, as we strove to smell like ourselves with warm fleshy fragrances like Glossier You or Escentric Molecules.

The perfume renaissance of 2023 has sparked something slightly different – a continuation of our yearning for personalisation and perception, but ever-intensified. Now instead of achieving this through scents that “adapt” to our pheromones, we are wearing fragrances specifically curated to fit our hyper-niche micro-cores and aesthetics.

“Our culture is obsessed with individuality, or the illusion of individuality. Perfume can do this: be an exclamation, an armour, or a weapon,” Scout Dixon West tells me. Despite only publishing her first video on TikTok in August, West is a #PerfumeTok sensation, having amassed over 100k followers who are borderline obsessed with her niche fragrance reviews. Full of rich storytelling that interweaves personal memories, societal observations and collective cultural touchstones, West’s videos describe perfumes in such deliciously evocative terms as having “a mastic medical opening, like painter’s turpentine or holy anointing oil” or talks about wearing classic men’s fragrances as feeling like “an estranged Kennedy no longer invited to family affairs because I drove the Rolls Royce into the foyer”.

“I was surprised, at first, to learn that there was a large perfume community on TikTok,” she says. “I could see it in my life; the people around me were increasingly becoming interested in perfume, and I arrogantly thought it was simply my influence on my friends – but there is a perfume renaissance happening.”

@scoutdixonwest Eau, the humanity #perfume #perfumetiktok #fragrance #fragrancetiktok #fragrancetok #perfumetok #fyp #foryoupage ♬ original sound - SCOUT DIXON WEST

Like we’ve seen in fashion and beauty, perfume today is often about building a personal brand; part of the paradoxical drive for both hyper individuality and a sense of shared belonging that plagues even the best of us. The “[insert meaningless simulacra word here] girl” trend has become an unkillable cockroach on social media, from “clean girl” to “tomato girl”, “dark academia girl” and “coastal grandmother girl”. Each updated iteration attaches itself to a swathe of products emulating the specific aesthetic desired, and now fragrance is part of the package as well.

Despite perhaps temporarily fielding an idea of subculture and community, hyper-commodification is unaffordable, superfluous and repetitive. However, we still crave a little indulgent treat, even in times of economic downturn, as the Lipstick Effect illustrates. Perhaps this is part of what is now drawing a younger generation into smelling as niche as a horse girl or going into an antique store on a crisp Autumn day. These ultra-niche fragrance fascinations are an extension of our post-pandemic escapism in an age of austerity and international horrors. Once the building blocks of memories, we now buy perfumes with these hyper-specific aspirations attached – manifesting the memories, emotions and even lifestyles you hope to create.

Last year, PHLUR’s Missing Person became the most talked about fragrance on the internet after a TikTok of a girl brought to tears by the scent went viral, selling out on launch and amassing a 250,000-person waiting list. The appeal was that users believed the fragrance transformed into the scent of someone who you miss or the feeling of being in love. “Traditionally, people need to smell fragrance before purchasing and the fact that we were not in any stores or counters at the time when we launched really proved to us that strong storytelling can be so powerful,” says Chriselle Lim, PHLUR’s creative director. “The generation today wears and views fragrance very differently.”

Perfume brands in the past relied on the idea of selling aspiration through dramatic, celeb-heavy campaigns (which are now being satirised). Now the success newer brands are gaining comes from tapping into the essence of being human: emotion, memory, shared history and storytelling. And while the digital is coming to play a larger role in our engagement with fragrance, ultimately it is something that can never be fully demonstrated online. Perfume offers an experience that is both shared and solipsistic, but crucially, grounded in real life. In the age of digital beauty, your personal scent becomes the singular mystery that can’t be perceived through a screen. To know someone’s scent is to truly know them – it’s the ultimate intimacy in the age of online.