Why Everyone Is Wearing Strange Scents

If you watch enough big-budget perfume adverts you will see a pattern emerge. An elegant woman in chic repose struts through her opulent flat, transforms into a powerful glamazon with a spritz of jasmine-scented perfume. Or a hulking man traverses rugged terrain, the elements mirroring the earthy, musky notes of his cologne, before wooing his woman. These narrative and gendered archetypes are etched into the cultural psyche and bear a clear message: scent is a tool of seduction.

A new class of independent perfumers, however, are capitalizing on a booming market for niche fragrances by creating scents that subvert the status quo. Some makers, like ‘Universal Flowering’ or the Italian perfumer Hilde Soliani, design strange, uncategorizable, and ungendered scents rooted in complex psychological states that challenge the notion of perfume solely as a means of amplifying your attractiveness. Others, like ‘Perfumer H’, handcraft idiosyncratic scents that conjure the natural world. These brands range in scale, geography, image and craft, but each share the goal of recasting fragrance as a potent form of personal and artistic expression, untethered to gender norms.

These brands are finding new audiences devoted to decoding each note and discovering hyper-niche perfume brands thanks in part to PerfumeTok and popular Instagram accounts that rate perfumes. Courtney Rafuse, founder of Universal Flowering, whose best-selling perfume is a porcini and vetiver-scented fragrance called ‘Daddy,’ feels niche perfume offers people a unique form of self-expression in a suffocating digital environment that stifles individual identity in service of aesthetic sameness. “I think everyone right now is hungry to feel like an individual because it’s impossible to be an individual anymore,” she says. “We all have the same thoughts and ideas.” As people start to see perfume as an artform rather than a tool of subversion, they use scent in the same way they use fashion: to express themselves and find their people. “Smaller perfume brands give a sense of exclusivity,” she says. “Like, I want to smell the way I smell so that I can attract the right person or be friends with the people I want to be friends with and have this sense of community.”

In May, Rafuse released ‘Seduction Theory,’ a perfume collaboration with friend and designer of the brand ‘Spaboy’ Jacqueline Lachance. The name refers to a Freudian idea that hysteria and neuroses are rooted in sexual trauma. Rafuse calls the scent a “slutty jasmine” that highlights the ingredient’s “sour brightness, the greenness.” Once the top notes wear off, she warns, “there’s some nasty in there. But it’s really hot,” adds Lachance. “And it smells good on everyone.”

Seduction Theory offers a provocative, even perverse vision of sexual desire unseen in any perfume advert directed by Martin Scorsese. The original worlds built around these brands and the ideas attached to the scents are worlds away from the traditional image of an alluring, faux-empowered woman luring her dapper beau; just the opposite. Seduction Theory’s campaign imagery resembles stills from a psychosexual thriller: eerie, taut, erotic, as if viewers are playing voyeur to a crime of passion.

The blooming ecosystem of perfumers and online fandoms help position scent as an element of personal style with an aesthetic point of view on perfume that runs counter to the luxury conglomerates (whose perfume sales are also skyrocketing.) For her part, Lyn Harris, the classically trained perfumer behind Perfumer H, believes that a commitment to craft and integrity distinguishes Perfumer H from mass market brands. “Today people want to know who the perfumer is, how it’s been made, where the ingredients come from and who made the bottle. From the perfumer to the glass blower, from the cabinet maker who designs our shops to the incense maker in Kyoto,” she writes in an email. Harris places the arena of scent entirely outside the context of luring a partner by linking it to provenance, craft and a sense of place.

Hilde Soliani is the exemplary punk artist-as-perfumer of Parma who channels her eccentricities and emotions into scents that recall the nuanced flavors of food. For example, Fraaagola Saalaaata smells of salted strawberries, Il Tempo delle Mele of apple cake and Eau de Cuisine contains notes of fish, nuts, parmesan and liquor. Soliani said she’s “inspired by food, not only sweet but salty.” Of her first fragrance, she remembered that “the emotion came when my eyes started to cry with joy.” Soliani is uninterested in using scent to amplify attractiveness, but to channel—and bottle—her emotions and life experiences. It’s perfume as a creative practice.

These irreverent perfumes offer fresh avenues for expression and individuality, a new aesthetic vehicle to mine the psyche, reveal desires, influence perception and find community.  Ironically, social media has become the virtual clubhouse for “fragheads.” Sharing an olfactory experience on a visual medium proves that scent transcends the physical, creating new modes of exploration, experimentation and connection.  Now, finding your signature scent is act of soul-searching—not strictly seduction.