The fragrance industry is bigger (and more annoying) than ever.
Perfume sales are surging. Do you know what you're buying?
Feed Me is sponsored by Merit today, which means there is no paywall.
This story starts with a tiny bottle, a little bit larger than a pill.
Over the summer, I met with the MERIT team to learn about the brand’s first fragrance, Retrospect. They were still finishing production for the full-sized bottles but they were able to send me home with a small sample of the product to test out the scent and see if I wanted to work with them on the launch.
Between spraying Retrospect on my wrists with the MERIT team at a coffee shop in my neighborhood, and getting home, alchemy had occurred on my skin. I knew what I smelled immediately – pear (I thought it was apple, but close), bergamot, vanilla. But after a few minutes of increased body heat from my sunny walk, complexity revealed itself – rosemary, and moss, something more earthy and rich.
Headlines about the fragrance industry over the past year include: When Did Teen Boys Get a Nose for $300 Cologne? (NYT); Lightning in a Bottle: Tapping Into the Niche Fragrance Boom (BoF); The fragrance industry is booming. Here’s why it makes scents. (WaPo); Gen Z Wants to Smell Rich. It’s Driving Luxury Fragrance Sales (Bloomberg).
You’re reading Feed Me, which means you probably know that I’m pro-business and pro-innovation (and that poorly-executed marketing for junk products drives me crazy). Fragrance launches, acquisitions, TikTok virality and celebrity spokespeople have been driving a lot of the clicks and purchases that the media is covering – but what about what’s inside the bottle? An Instagram marketing campaign can tell you how a brand wants you to feel when you use its fragrance, but often the actual experience falls short. Sometimes before a product has even been developed, a face and creative direction have been locked in, with the goal to sell. To most of you, this isn’t shocking.
I think new consumers of fragrance usually go wrong in two areas: misunderstanding notes (you might think you like vanilla, but you really like tonka or cinnamon or you just like vanilla ice cream), or immediately consuming what is popular (your favorite brand launches three perfumes, so you buy all three). Fragrance is an emotional, sensory product. Smell can instantly trigger an emotional response along with a memory… or not, and you just smell like something you paid for. There’s an entirely different essay to be written about fragrance marketing and the promise of attracting men, but I’m not going to begin to tackle that today.
When I decided to take a fragrance course at The Fashion Institute of Technology a year ago, I didn’t know much about the category and I never imagined I’d one day work with a brand like MERIT on the launch of their first fragrance. I was writing Feed Me every day, and couldn’t ignore the daily headlines about the booming business of fragrance (which many of you might be tired of reading about by now) – and I wanted to learn more about it. So I spent every Wednesday night in a dark, cold lab learning the foundations of perfume. And every week I was grateful that I could better understand where the influx of the TikTok recommendations, and the explosion within this corner of the beauty industry was coming from.
Pretty quickly, I started experiencing sensations differently. I correctly guessed all of the flavors added to Diet Coke (cinnamon! vanilla! citrus!) one night after class. When I traveled, I was able to seek out perfumers ( and have conversations with them about local botanicals and methods. I enjoyed the discipline of going to a classroom on 27th Street every Wednesday evening. And the most useful skill: I was able to identify what I actually like in a fragrance. Like a higher fragrance oil concentration (the fragrance lasts longer), and real effort put into the balance (when there’s complexity you won’t get bored of it).
Retrospect took over two years and over 200 rounds to develop by master perfumer Fanny Bal (who has also worked on fragrances for Maison Martin Margiela, Dries Van Noten and Comme des Garcons). It’s a surprising and refreshing pivot away from the popular (often one-note) scents you encounter over and over and over in your office and at bars and while sitting next to someone on the train. I once wrote about hugging my mom when I was little when she’d come home to Long Island from work in the city. I’d put my face in her fur coat, inhale, and smell of unspecific smoke and New York nighttime glamour — this little bottle from Merit reminded me of that. Retrospect is harder explain than other perfumes that have launched recently because it also reminds me of biting into a sour apple while laying in wet grass. I think you’ll get when you smell it.
If we had a water cooler, I’d talk to you about:
Kyle Chayka wrote about Taylor Lorenz joining Substack.
told Chayka, “I don’t want to be a full-time writer. I want to be an Internet personality.” I told Chayka, “We’re definitely seeing the unbundling of the star staff writers that once made up our favorite magazines and newspapers. Some of them were greatly improved by the assignments, judgment, and prose surgery of their editors.”Buy Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez’s new book Victoria’s Secret, Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon. I went to their book party last night at Borgo, and I heard the exclamation, “This is like an old school media party!” at least three times. Beautiful New York night.
For all of you who were inquiring about Rachel Tashjian’s newsletter Opulent Tips, she told me that if you email her saying that you subscribe to Feed Me and Washington Post, she’ll let you in.
New York Magazine interviewed Alex Cooper’s latest hire, Owen Thiele. “I think Alex thought people knew who I was when she signed me. I really, really scared the network.”
WHO will be the first fashion writer to leave Substack for a six-figure job at The New York Times?
Brandy Melville is bringing back those Italian chain link charm bracelets.
I’m going to propose something: what if I become a Mets fan? They have magic pumpkins, gorgeous families, and they're having so much fun. Someone please bring me to a game.
Debates seem to be the event format of choice for Substack events. Last night,
hosted a debate called “Should the US still police the world?” Last week, hosted a debate about holes. And the week prior, hosted a debate about all kinds of topics like Zyn and dating.
I asked Anna and Dasha if Donald Trump is going on Red Scare and Dasha said, “Haha no comment.”
Down to talk about fragrance class in the comments.
See you tomorrow.
A dear friend of mine is a fragrance engineer at one of the major fragrance houses and has been there for 7+ yrs since graduating as a chemical engineer. The yrs of training they put engineers through to become a "nose" and create fragranced products is no joke - they are tied up with non-competes that seem more serious than financial institutions. Its been crazy to learn about how the fragrance interacts with all elements of the product it goes into - between the actual smell, how to bottle, stabilizing, potential chemical interactions etc. its a complicated business! Also learning about what is considered and marketed as "natural" in fragrance ...
You should read the book "The Emperor of Scent" if you haven't! It’s about a scent scientist and perfume savant (he wrote one of the bestselling perfume guides of all time), how / why we smell the way we do, and the drama of French perfume houses. Non-fiction but reads like a crime drama.