Nope, Your Perfume Does Not Have to Fit Your ~Aesthetic~
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If you love fragrance like I do, chances are you’ve found yourself on #perfumetok—a fast-growing corner of TikTok (it currently has 4.5 billion views and counting) full of influencers in the scent space. Once you pass #perfumetok’s initiation (making fragrantica.com your homepage, regrettably googling what ambergris is, and having all your tote bags jingle with samples) you’ll start to see a specific type of a video consistently pop up on your feed…
It goes something like this: A content creator with a silky-smooth voice, green-screened over an Oxbridge-looking campus, proclaims that if you wear plaid skirts, dark lipstick, and read A Secret History by Donna Tartt, then the “Dark Academia” perfume of your dreams is Replica Whispers in the Library. These creators make finding a new scent seem so easy and prescriptive, but IMO they’ve got it all wrong. You don’t actually need to match your perfume to your ~vibe~. You just have to frickin’ like it. So please, before you drop $160 to cosplay as a moody prep school student, consider: Do you actually like wood, vanilla, and pepper notes? Have you actually experienced the scent for yourself?
Perfume, like so many other beauty categories, has officially entered its social media era and has consequently fallen victim to the inescapable clutch of personal branding in the form of the newest “core” or “aesthetic.” These aesthetics we enjoy online seem to touch everything IRL: our clothes, home decor, music, film, art, and now fragrance. It all becomes packaged into cute little shoppable terms like: “clean girl,” “vanilla girl,” “coastal grandmother,” “cottagecore,” “dark academia”...and I hate it.
Instead of liking a perfume because you enjoy smelling sweet and edible, we’re now told to buy a fresh, sandalwood-heavy scent because it evokes “clean girl energy.” Love crisp whites, dewy makeup, and meal prepping? Then you need Glossier You and Juliette Has a Gun Not a Perfume. And if your vibe is sitting in the back of a jazz club sipping an old fashioned in an all-black ensemble, you’ll be pointed to Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille or Celine’s Reptile 10/10 times. As for the cottagecore Hill House fairy princesses? They are offered Gucci Mémoire and only Gucci Memoire.
I mean, sure, at a basic level, there’s nothing outwardly wrong with this method of finding a new scent, but it’s just so narrow and limiting. Can’t I want to smell like a soapy hotel bubble bath AND listen to Sleater-Kinney? Does hot always have to smell like Carolina Herrara’s Good Girl, or can I be hot and smell like oakmoss? Am I allowed to enjoy the way fig mixes with coconut on my wrist without it being all about my “mermaidcore summer”? These influencers need to stop telling us to find our exact right scent, brand, and bottle and make it all neatly fit into an internet trope—it’s honestly exhausting.
Aside from being reductive and boring, the problem with taking this one-aesthetic-fits-all approach to perfume is that scent is so deeply personal. There are no rules, norms, or guidelines—it’s all about individual preferences and emotional ties. Our draw to certain scents are impacted by so much more than the clothes we wear or the color scheme of your phone background. We have different body chemistry, associations, memories, and feelings—these are all the true influencers when it comes to fragrance. For example, you might pick out a perfume with a rosemary note because of nostalgia for the rosemary bush that grew on the side of your childhood home or because you love baking bread or because it just smelled good on you. All of this considered, why would we want to take something with so few barriers and confines and, well, confine it? After all, vibes can’t make you suddenly like vetiver.
To be clear—I don’t want to paint all perfume influencers as negative. There are so many talented creators I love and who engage with fragrance in thoughtful, interesting, and passionate ways. And I don’t want to tell you not to romanticize perfume by say… pretending you’re on vacation by wearing Bobbi Brown’s Beach to the office or by making playlists based on your perfumes (like I have). Fragrance should be fun! Not forced.
So what if we stopped trying to box scent into some predetermined “aesthetic” and instead let ourselves be surprised by all the scents we actually like or feel an emotional connection to? Everything is so categorized right now—can we just separate perfume from that narrative, pls? Because really, this is just scented alcohol in a bottle. It doesn’t have to fit your personal brand—it just has to smell good.
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