Ask Ugly: signature scents are deeply appealing – but how else can I express ‘the self’?

Hi Ugly,

I’ve recently undergone a hunt for a perfume, testing dozens of samples. While I’m aware this all started because I was seeing 20 TikToks a day dishing out scent recommendations mashed with beautifully aesthetic photos, there’s also something deeply appealing to me about having a “signature scent”.

This seems like a natural want – to define the “self” and differentiate it as unique, but I’m curious how you’d think about expressing this in a “healthier” way?

– Make It Make Scents

In late 2023, I predicted fragrance would be the focal point of the beauty industry in 2024, thanks to its exploitable associations with inner wellbeing. There’s also its scientific link to the limbic system: smell is the only one of the five senses that bypasses the thalamus, an area of the brain associated with logic, and instead interacts with the “reptilian” brain structures (hippocampus, amygdala) associated with emotion and memory.

And I was right!

Perfume sales are surging in both prestige and niche categories this year. “Outfit of the day” posts on social media (#ootd) are slowly being replaced by “scent of the day” posts (#sotd), and screenshots of notes from perfume forum Fragrantica.com function as faceless selfies.

Jean Madar, chairman and CEO of InterParfums Inc, recently told Bloomberg that fragrance is part of a person’s “core identity”. And while cosmetic companies can face criticism for conflating external products with existential outcomes – like a facial serum that implies a “secure attachment” style, the absurdity of which I will never shut up about! – perfume conveniently sidesteps the problems of the flesh. It’s not trying to change how you look, but how you feel, and, for the span of a spritz at least, it does. In the age of wellness-as-beauty and neurocosmetics, the science of scent is marketing gold.

But the more I think about your question, Make It Make Scents, the more I wonder if what we’re after here is not a sense of self but a (related) sense of life.

I say “we” because – despite my documented skepticism of beauty brands – I, too, am powerless against a good perfume ad.

Last month, casually depressed and subconsciously seeking comfort and some sort of release, I spent $240 on a scent called Tears by Régime de Fleurs. “What a luxury to weep,” the website read. It described the perfume as “emotion in liquid form, the romance and the sadness”. It promised “nostalgia” too, with notes of lilac to remind me of my grandmother’s front yard and frankincense to call up childhood Sundays spent in incense-blessed church pews. I suppose I wanted Tears to take me back to a time when someone who loved me baked me cookies every week, when I believed in God and goodness, and life stretched ahead of me in an endless expanse of hope and potential.

Of course, it didn’t do that. It smelled fine. I felt something, for a second. But I was still me, and I was still mostly numb.

I thought of that perfume the other day while reading the preface to Henry James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove. James summarized it as the story “of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life” – someone “passionately desiring” to “achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived”.

Something clicked: how to explain Tears if not a brief and broken sense of having cried?

And Charlotte Tilbury’s new “emotion-boosting” fragrance More Sex, “designed to enhance feelings of sex”, if not a brief and broken sense of having sex?

Couldn’t we describe the “journey of being wildly yourself” promised by Wildly Me, the new perfume from Millie Bobby Brown, as a brief and broken sense of living?

Dramatic as that all may sound, evoking life has always been the aim of industrialized fragrance. Alchemists in the Middle Ages were guided by the impulse to “isolate whatever made a living thing alive, and preserve it forever in a bottle”, Theresa Levitt writes in Elixir: A Story of Perfume, Science and the Search For the Secret of Life. They believed the scent chemicals they distilled from plant matter were “the vital force that directed plants’ growth”, and called this quality spiritus rector. The term spiritus rector was later replaced by aroma.

Aroma’s association with life was so strong that demand for scents spiked in times of mass death. During the bubonic plague, “vast resources poured into supplying the court with perfumes”, writes Levitt, in “an effort to hoard the essence of life itself”.

It makes sense then, Make It Make Scents, that you and I and everyone else are scrambling to inhale an approximation of life right now, in an era one could reasonably describe as lifeless: the mass deaths of Covid, mass loneliness across the country, the lull in sex and friendship, the rise in anxiety and depression. We want to snort the essence of existence! We want feeling, straight to the brain! The future is bleak, but this fragrance smells like “you’re about to get what you want”, and I guess that’s good enough!

I think your instinct to find “healthier” ways to get what you want is a smart one. I also don’t think it’s hard. Pay attention to why you’re drawn to a particular perfume and ask yourself, how can I replace – or at least enhance – what I think I’ll get from this product with an actual lived experience?

For example: last month on X, a woman went viral for sharing a story about how much her Uber driver loved her perfume; throughout the ride, he went on and on about how good she smelled. Commenters begged the woman to share the scent she was wearing, not because the poster hinted at top notes or name-dropped a designer nose – she didn’t – but because she proved her perfume could lead to attention. Connection. It could set the wearer apart as special.

So, instead of buying Baccarat Rouge 540, try … talking to people. Uber drivers, baristas, strangers at the bar, whoever. Ask questions. Have something to say. Leave an impression beyond your store-bought smell!

Or, if you’re contemplating a formula that “smells like coming in from working in a damp garden bed”, consider first working in a damp garden bed (an herb garden on a shallow windowsill counts).

If you’re thinking, “I need a perfume that smells like [half] sweet [and half] unsweet iced tea with lemon” ... You know what I’m going to say. Go get yourself a tall, cold beverage.

Chasing nostalgia? Reread an old diary, watch a movie from when you were young or call up an old friend and reminisce. Obsessed with the smell of roses? Take a fraction of what you’d spend on Le Labo Rose 31 and buy yourself a bouquet; meditate on your own impermanence as it wilts.

Disclaimer: fragrance can also be an art form, a hobby, an escape, even a sort of poetry. (Many true and lovely words have been written about perfume from this point of view, like Luca Turin’s The Secret of Scent and the recent 12-part newsletter series from Dirt and Are.na, Scent Access Memory, and I encourage you to read them.) It’s fine to enjoy perfume for perfume’s sake; it’s not fine to expect those delicate little bottles to bear the weight of making you feel alive.

That said, if you really want to “differentiate yourself as unique”? Forget about fragrance altogether. Everybody’s buying it.