The Joy of Gen Z's New Perfume Culture

Newsletter #9: smellmaxxers, capitalism, and building a culture of olfaction

There’s a new species hanging out at the watering hole.

Whenever I’m lurking around the fragrance counter in a department or beauty store, if I feel like I’m not bothering the salespeople I always ask them the same thing:

‘Have you noticed an uptick in young men coming to your store?’

Without fail, their eyes go round as they recall the swarm of teenage boys who land on their stores a perfect half an hour after the school bell rings. They point to nearly empty tester bottles of Spicebomb and Luna Rossa Black and Versace Eros. One store told me they had gone to extremes and put their perfumes behind locked glass because they had to do something about the ‘excessive stock shrinkage.’

Call it smellmaxxxing and read about it in the New York Times with the slightly concerned fascination that adults always have for a youth culture they don’t understand, but it is undeniable: young men are obsessed with expensive perfume.

This phenomenon is one chapter in the larger story of how perfume culture is rapidly becoming mainstream culture. Or perhaps it’s truer to say that perfume is become more embedded into mainstream culture.

There’s something in the water; there’s magic in the juice; the world of perfume obsession is exploding into the mainstream.

Why is this happening, is it a good thing, and dear god - what is going to happen next?

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Why do people love perfume?

It’s a question with a thousand answers. Even for myself there are a dozen reasons I can think of: I love the adventure of researching and discovering new scents; I love the way a good perfume makes me feel; I love the challenge of trying to understand a perfume, like putting together pieces of a puzzle. Like any art form, the joy I get from perfume has many different faces.

Perfume has something to appeal to nearly everyone who is able to smell. It is the most accessible form of luxury and the most inclusive form of beauty. It is the highest art form for an entire sense and it engages the brain as differently as music from a painting.

Olfaction is an entire dimension of our bodies and our lives that we are encouraged to explore through perfume.

You have heard the old cliché that scent is closely tied to memory, and like most clichés there's a kernel of truth in it. Perfume can be tied to memory, but it often goes further and becomes tied to identity.

People want a perfume that smells like me, or even like me, but better; they want to have a perfume with intense projection that goes beast mode; they want a signature scent that will always remind others of them long after they've gone.

Perfume is personal, because you wear it, and performative, because others smell it on you. Perfume is external rather than inherent. It’s something you buy to display on your body, like clothes or jewellery, and is therefore a part of how we present ourselves to the world. In this way perfume can be tied to class, gender, sexuality, profession - it becomes caught up in the complexities of humanity.

Art, beauty, psychology, identity, who you are and what you can afford and what you want others to think of you, all macerating in a bottle of eau de toilette.

Perfume has always been a small but undeniable part of the fabric of society, but since 2020, there’s been a vibe shift - perfume’s getting bigger. The church of people who see fragrance as hobby, addiction, obsession is getting broader and broader every day. The majority of these newcomers are young people - generations Z and Alpha, who were raised on the internet - and they are building their own communities and culture dedicated to fragrance on platforms like Tiktok and Youtube.

For those of us who have been deep in the fragrance trenches for many years, this sudden explosion is a source of fascination. Is it a flow on from COVID? Are we witnessing a generational change, or will it pass? What will happen when brands begin to create perfumes influenced by and catered to this new and fanatic audience?

With greater popularity comes greater scrutiny. In the past five years the amount of culture coverage of perfume outside of dedicated perfume sites and blogs has exploded.

This is both brilliant, because I love to read about fragrance, and terrible, because most of these articles don’t know how to write about fragrance.

The new perfume boom has brought a truth uncomfortably to light: very few culture and beauty writers know how to analyse perfume and perfume culture. Coverage of fragrance has long been thrown into either the beauty or the fashion editor’s domain, with most mainstream fragrance journalism being little more than advertising.

I’m an organised obsessive who keeps an alert system and a feed for any and all fragrance articles and coverage, and I was intrigued to see an article from The Cut appear on my feed a couple of weeks ago. The Cut is a part of New York Magazine’s culture and lifestyle imprints. Its sister publications include Vulture and The Strategist, which occasionally serve up the kind of shallow niche-hawking perfume content that is riddled with inaccuracies and always ends with an affiliate link.

The Cut’s article is called ‘Fragrance Culture is Starting To Stink’ and it is half analysis of current fragrance trends and half op-ed about why post-2020 fragrance is culture is terrible and no good. It’s an interesting article and I encourage you to read it.

thecut

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The author is determined to understand and adopt the fanatic love of perfume and fragrance culture that has arisen in the past five years. At the end of her experience she concludes that fragrance culture is cynical, soulless, and little more than an easy mechanism for capitalism to capture young consumers.

Many of the articles' issues seem to be focused on the culture of capitalism, of which perfume is certainly a symptom but not a cause. (And yes, I do find it ironic that an article framing fragrance culture as a societal ill has a beat that runs a perfume prompt through generative AI).

Perfumery is undeniably an expensive hobby. Anyone who says it isn’t is lying to you. But there are more accessible ways to learn about perfume - sample sets and scent swaps, decant sites and good old going down to the department store and sniffing everything for free. You do not need to own a hundred bottles of perfume to love perfume, and fragrance is far from the only subculture that has a problem with overconsumption.

Perfume as a hobby might not be for you, but this does not make it a net bad thing.

The Cut article states that ‘Commerce is the goal’ of perfumery (well, yes - it is a commercial product) and that ‘the target market of the perfume industry is Gen Z’ (the reference for this quote is another article on The Cut).

It’s about halfway through reading that you need to take break from an article that is so exhaustingly pejorative. The broad sweeps of commentary about the changing nature of perfume as an industry are, mostly, accurate, but the way the article frames them all as a negative feels short sighted and unfair.

When the author gives commentary on a perfume she tried, she states, “Often, the details of a perfume don’t seem to matter as long as they bring about the feeling of intellectual conquest…. But beyond that, I can’t really evaluate it; I don’t have a Ph.D.”

I really can’t decide what depresses me more: the way this article frames Gen Z as naïve children being taken advantage of by Big Perfume and their own noses, or the anti-intellectualist nonsense that says you need an advanced education to engage with perfume on anything higher than a base emotional level.

The best coverage of perfume has always been independent, but as perfume begins to become a part of an entire generation’s vocabulary I hope that we can anticipate better, more intelligent coverage of perfume as culture from mainstream media. The new generation of perfume aficionados will demand it.

I am clearly a biased opinion on this topic. But what I found myself thinking at the end of reading The Cut article was, I hope the author gives fragrance another go. I understand how you could dip your toes into online perfume spaces and be depressed by the aggressive consumption they seem to encourage.

If I had only seen the worst parts of a culture, I would probably give it up as well. But there are incredible ways to explore the world of fragrance that don't cost a thing and that will enrich your life in so many ways.

It is proven that scent training increases cognitive function and has positive effects for memory and vocabulary. But more than this, being conscious of what you smell and enjoying it is one of the simplest and greatest of life’s pleasures.

You don't need to buy perfume sample sets to proactively think about smell. Go to a botanical garden; go to a national park; go to a farmer's market. Go to all the places you usually visit and take a deep breath in and think about what you are smelling. Try to name the different things you can smell, and then try to decide if you like them.

If you do - why?

If you don't - why?

Understanding the way things smell and the way you will react, instinctively, to scents you love and hate is a journey you never really stop taking throughout your life. And it's fun. You will never be bored in a room if you are thinking about smell. In many ways our association between olfaction and perfume can do us a disservice - would you ever be able to truly appreciate a rose perfume if you'd never smelled a rose?

I promise you that you already love smell. Your body is wired to always be sniffing. There’s merit and there is joy in exploring that deeper, but that need not take the form of spending a fortune on perfume.

Perfume is the end of the journey that can start in your pantry, your bathroom, your backyard. Start for free and I promise you the love will bloom. And I promise you that you won’t even need a PHD to do it.

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I was in a department store’s perfume section, armed with blotter and pen, when I saw them. It was like spotting a mythical creature, the herd of Artemis: crowded down in the front of the Gucci stand was a group of about seven teenage boys.

They were in their school uniforms, bags on their backs, and they were rolling through the Gucci pour Homme flankers with military efficiency. Take a bottle off the shelf, spray, pass to the next boy, spray, and on and on. Put the bottle back and then discuss.

They weren’t hurting anyone. They weren’t damaging anything. They were a group of boys hanging out in the perfume section after school and they were having the time of their lives doing it.

When one of them mentioned Alberto Morillas and commented that Gucci Guilty Absolute smells like bandaids (I own a bottle - it does), the rest of them burst out laughing and sprayed it a few times on his arm.

It's a funny thing, the geopolitics of a department store perfume section. You're always under the eye of the sales assistant, whose temperaments range from letting you wander to hovering so closely and unpleasantly that you feel like you're about to be arrested.

These boys were spraying in abundance, and I couldn't help but blink an eye to the sales assistant to see if she was about to swing in and rescue the maligned Gucci bottles. But she was behind the Roberto Cavalli stand a few rows away, rearranging the bottles and casting an occasional bemused glance over at the boys.

They were, I felt, well known to her.

When the smellmaxxxing hurricane had left, I struck up conversation with the assistant. 'Are they in here very often?'

She laughed. 'Oh yes, every weekday! Usually in a big group like that. But sometimes the same boys come with their parents on the weekend - that's when they buy.'

'I noticed that a lot of the men's fragrance testers were pretty empty.'

'We can't keep them on the shelves! And these boys, I thought they were taking the piss at first - sorry - but they're so clever. They know more about the perfumes than me sometimes. Top notes, base notes. They know all of it. They're our best sellers now, the men's fragrances. Le Male, Sauvage, Versace, the Tom Fords. Good on 'em.'

That bewildered feeling was there when she spoke, the way adults are always mystified by the rituals and obsessions of children. But she and I agreed that there was something kind of brilliant about it. What other generation of teenage boys would spend their time in the beauty section of a luxury store? A place so socially targeted towards women that usually only saw men on Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, the frenzied two weeks before Christmas.

I left the store thinking: how wonderful was that?

I left the store thinking, Good on them.

I'm hopeful for the smellmaxxxing teens that are haunting the world's shopping centres. The obsessions you have as a teenager stay with you for life. It's my hope that they keep sniffing, and that the culture of fragrance young people are building for themselves will lead to something we have never seen before: a consumer baseline of perfume literacy.

A generation of perfume sniffers who talk about calone and ambroxan and cis-hexonal 8 have the potential to fundamentally change - and mature - how perfume is marketed and sold. In the same way it would have been unthinkable to market a skincare product using 'hyaluronic acid' in the name fifteen years ago, we will see the benefits of a generation that has taught themselves about olfaction reflected in the products marketed to them.

This is a momentum that perfumery has never seen before. As the tide rises for lovers of fragrance we have an opportunity to build a culture that is intelligent, empathetic, and empowered to talk about the perfume industry with clarity and passion. That's what I'll be doing, and at the end of the day it's for one reason only: because perfume is my passion. Because perfume makes me happy.

And that’s why the next generation love perfume, too. Many of these young people stumble into perfume through their friends or through influencers, like the odious Jeremy Fragrance, but if it lights that passion for olfaction in them I can't help but see that as a good thing. They're the future of perfume and they will be the most literate sniffers we've maybe ever seen. There is so much to look forward to.

We must encourage and support a love of fragrance, beyond consumerism, in our young people. They deserve to have space to explore perfumery and build a culture and a passion for it on their own terms. We know that younger generations are crying out for community, so let’s make room for them in ours - because olfaction is a joy and it should be a joy for everyone.

And after all, there's a lot of subcultures out there that stink much worse than perfume. ▣