My reality may be filled with a multitude of images, but the beauty products most visible on my screen are aimed not at my eyes, but at my nose.
Published at 2:41 am. Updated at 9:00 a.m.
Since the pandemic, the perfume industry has taken over a prominent place in my feed and even pushed me to perfect my smell knowledge. Encouraged by numerous online communities, I became a real frag head (for scent head), an incredibly diverse market.
The perfumes featured on my platforms are artisanal productions, often far removed from the commercial creations found in department stores. Perfume TikToker Emma Vernon, who also hosts the podcast show Perfume Room, tells me that “oddly enough, and even contrary to the name of her category, [les parfums] Niches have now (somehow) become mainstream.” Even I, a girl who didn’t wear perfume at all, spent the last year spraying myself with an underground scent that was supposed to smell like cakes and balloons1. When I’m no longer surprised to come across a targeted ad selling me a perfume made with puppy breath, or when a friend tells me she bought a bottle of Jasmin et Cigarette3, I have to recognize the surprising growth in this particular niche understand.
According to Emma Vernon, TikTok has clearly helped fuel the growing craze for perfumes. I would like to add that access to exclusive creations has also become more democratic, especially thanks to the sampling service offered by several online companies specializing in niche perfumery, such as Luckyscent or Scent Split. It’s now possible to discover a range of unique scents 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 for it, but not necessarily to make it our trademark.
An acquaintance even told me about sniffing parties, the evenings she organizes at home where perfumes become an excuse for discussions and exchanges.
In parallel to her podcast, Emma Vernon also hosts a Smell Club on Zoom, a perfume-version reading club that allows people to discover and analyze five olfactory creations every month.
As owning perfume is part of an experiential approach, it’s becoming less and less taboo to collect bottles or create a “wardrobe full of scents,” a phrase I adopted from Sable Yong, a beauty journalist who also hosts the smell podcast Smell. moderated Yes later. According to Yong: “ [.. ] Perfume culture has undoubtedly changed in recent years, especially since the pandemic. People used scents to lift their mood or enrich the rooms in which they spent most of their time. Sales of luxury perfumes and home fragrances skyrocketed and have continued to grow ever since.”
Because the pandemic represented a new reality, it changed our perception of time by depriving us of reference points. I remember feeling like I was stuck in a sequence of days that blended into one another. However, since smells are often linked to our memories, they represent a form of secure temporal anchoring. ” [Les parfums]“It lets us vicariously travel to different periods of our lives,” whispers my fellow poet Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, who in November is launching a unisex perfume with scents of blue spruce and citrus, Stellaire4, the result of a collaboration with Dominic Goyer.
In fact, I believe that there is a connection to be made between perfumes and poetry. To talk about a smell we have to use metaphors almost systematically.
According to Marissa Zappas, a popular New York poet and perfumer: “ […] Smells do not have their own language, so it is difficult to speak olfactorily or write about perfumes, it requires more creativity.” And it is true that the discussion about smells on the Internet is particularly imaginative. Sometimes I waste hours reading the colorful descriptions that Internet users post 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, fluorescent yellow lights, a carpet – but in a good way.” »
In short, the enthusiasm for niche perfumes does not necessarily correspond to the desire to “smell good”. Rather, it perfectly captures the comment culture that runs through the current Internet. This culture not only promotes a consumer product, it also transforms it into a unifying object: the niche perfume thus awakens the desire to learn and enables us to take part in a critical discourse and join a community. So it’s no wonder that it colonizes my food. Following the logic of social media, it is suitable for social consumption and at the same time paradoxically promises the highest level of individualization.