TikTok is changing the perfume business

Mint

11-07-2025

TO SMELL LIKE 'generational wealth", wear Louis Vuitton. One of Glossier's perfumes will stop a runner in his tracks. A bottle by Phlur will give you chills and make you cry. These endorsements come not from starlets in tv adverts, but from social-media users. 'This actually made me go buy it," reads a typical comment, this one with 19,000 likes.
Fragrance may be the smallest category in the beauty sector, but it is growing fast. McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons that global sales will reach $106bn by 2028, an increase of $30bn from 2023. Fragrance's growth is projected to outpace that of makeup, haircare and skincare.
Social media are driving this boom. TikTok is particularly influential: in 2023 two-thirds of Gen-Z Americans told Circana, a research firm, that the short-video app had influenced their fragrance-buying habits more than any other platform. Beauty is by far the bestselling segment on TikTok Shop, the platform's e-commerce feature. Bottles that go viral on #PerfumeTok are quickly snatched off shelves.
Fragrance aficionados are driving trends as well as sales. Many point their followers not to luxury offerings from major fashion houses, but mid-range perfumes that 'smell expensive". Others recommend 'niche" scents made by small, independent brands. How you smell, these videos imply, should require as much thought as how you look.
Interest is growing in unexpected quarters. More than half of teenage boys in America surveyed by Piper Sandler, a bank, said they spritzed themselves every day, an increase of ten percentage points in two years. On average boys spent $110 annually on fragrance in 2024—up from $75 the year before—and compared with $93 spent by girls. This is due to 'smellmaxxing", a social-media trend whereby boys trade tips on how to smell fresh, seductive or musky.
For a time, the industry had a stale whiff about it. Some 15 years ago Jean-Claude Ellena, then the perfumer for Hermès and a celebrated 'nose", bemoaned that concentration in the industry—which is dominated by four firms—had resulted in bland uniformity: 'Forms have become similar, and the unique is rare." He felt that artisanal products were the key to perfumes' future as 'objects of desire".
That was prescient. What Mr Ellena could not have anticipated was the role social media would play in encouraging consumers to experiment. Aficionados assemble 'scent wardrobes" rather than pledge fealty to one product. Influencers show off shelves artfully arranged with dozens of bottles. Subscription services, which deliver samples monthly, are also taking off.
'Gen Z wants variety, they want collections," observes Jake Levy, a co-founder of Stéle, a perfume shop which has two sites in New York. Mr Levy says that the average spend in the Manhattan branch is around $500, as customers scoop up several bottles in a visit. 'The only people who want signature fragrances are over 60," he sniffs.
That perfume resonates on a noseblind internet may seem puzzling. But the digital realm has long been a place for collectors to discover, discuss and compare wares. Before TikTok, perfume-lovers uploaded videos to YouTube; some wrote about their favourite bottles in newsletters. Many still use a creaky website called Fragrantica, seemingly unchanged since its launch in 2007, to rate perfumes. In their attempts to describe specific smells, users have fun with floral language. (A review of Pure Poison by Dior, for instance, conjures the image of 'Snow White's long-decayed deceased body laying in a wooden casket in the forest at her forgotten-about funeral".)
Today an 80,000-strong group of 'Fragrantica Warriors" on X discuss how to smell like everything from cookies to credit cards. Perfume is intoxicating because smells are highly evocative. A scent can be aspirational: Mr Levy says young women in their 20s ask to smell like an 'opulent old lady". Smells bring back memories, too. Buyers seek out the scent of freshly cut grass, for instance. Some simply marvel at perfumers' ability to recreate particular odours. Mr Levy offers a scent reminiscent of cat urine. 'Believe it or not," he says, 'we sell the hell out of that one."
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