My reality may be punctuated by a multitude of images, but the beauty products most visible on my screen are not aimed at my eyes, but at my nose.
Since the pandemic, the perfume industry has carved out a significant place for itself on my feed and has even pushed me to perfect my olfactory knowledge. Galvanized by numerous online communities, I became a real frag head (For fagrance head), an incredibly diverse market.
The perfumes featured on my platforms are artisanal productions, often far from the commercial creations found in department stores. Perfume tiktoker Emma Vernon, who also hosts the podcast show Perfume Roomtells me that “strangely and even contrary to the name of their category, [les parfums] niche are now (somehow) made mainstream “. Even I, a girl who didn’t wear perfume at all, spent the last year spraying myself with a scent underground supposed to smell like cake and balloons1. If I’m no longer surprised to come across a targeted ad selling me a puppy breath perfume2 or to hear a friend tell me that she bought a bottle of Jasmine and Cigarette3it remains to be understood the surprising growth of this specialized niche.
According to Emma Vernon, TikTok has clearly helped fuel the growing craze for perfumes. I would add that access to exclusive creations has also become more democratic, in particular thanks to the sample service offered by several online businesses specializing in niche perfumery, such as Luckyscent or Scent Split. It is now possible to discover a range of unique fragrances without necessarily breaking the bank. Therefore, the culture that develops around smells is one of experimentation and learning. We buy a sample out of curiosity, to smell it with friends or to express our personal appreciation of it, but not necessarily to make it our signature.
An acquaintance even told me about sniff partiesevenings that she organizes at home and where perfumes become a pretext for discussion and sharing.
In parallel with her podcast, Emma Vernon also hosts a smell club on Zooma kind of perfume version of a reading club which allows people to discover and analyze five olfactory creations per month.
Since owning perfumes is part of an experiential approach, it is becoming less and less taboo to collect vials or to compose a “wardrobe of scents”, an expression that I borrow from Sable Yong, a beauty journalist who also hosts an olfactory podcast, Smell Ya Later. According to Yong, “ [.. ] perfume culture has undoubtedly transformed in recent years, particularly since the pandemic. People turned to scents to lift their spirits or enrich the spaces in which they spent most of their time. Sales of luxury perfumes and home fragrances skyrocketed and have continued to grow ever since.”
The pandemic, because it constituted a new reality, altered our perception of time by depriving us of reference points. I remember feeling like I was stuck in a succession of days that blurred into each other. However, as smells are often linked to our memories, they provide a form of secure temporal anchoring. “ [Les parfums]it makes us travel vicariously to different periods of our lives,” whispers my poet colleague Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, who is launching a unisex perfume in November with scents of blue spruce and citrus fruits, Stellar4the result of a collaboration with Dominic Goyer.
In fact, I consider that there is a link to be forged between perfumes and poetry. Talking about a smell almost systematically requires us to use metaphors.
According to Marissa Zappas, a popular New York poet-perfumer, “ […] odors do not have their own language, so speaking olfactorily or writing about perfumes is difficult, it requires more creativity.” And it’s true that on the web, the discussion about smells is particularly inventive. I sometimes waste hours reading the colorful descriptions that Internet users publish on Frangrantica, a kind of Wikipedia for perfumes. On this digital olfactory encyclopedia we find funny opinions like: “This perfume reminds me of an old office space, fluorescent yellow lighting, a carpet – but in a good way. »
In short, the craze for niche perfumes does not necessarily respond to a desire to “smell good”. Rather, it perfectly embraces the culture of commentary that runs through the current web. This culture does not simply promote a consumer product, it also transforms it into a unifying object: the niche perfume thus generates a desire to learn and allows us to participate in a critical discourse, to join a community. No wonder, then, that it colonizes my feed. Following the logic of social media, it lends itself to consumption social, while paradoxically dangling the promise of supreme individualization.