For Moody Ko, memories of his childhood in Taiwan are dominated by the scent of jasmine, worn by his grandfather, a lover of perfume, who would bring bouquets of the flower to their local temple. When he came to Australia to study art, fragrance remained a strong influence, and in 1997 he opened his own boutique in Sydney’s Haymarket, calling it The Garden of Spring.
The warm, eclectic space is a far cry from the sanitised perfume halls in department stores. It’s where you’ll find all manner of oddities from around the globe, like a perfume made by a Romanian filmmaker that smells like old leather cinema chairs, cigarette butts and popcorn.
Ko and his two employees – Tah Chantarat and Jasmine Chow – are repositories of information, weaving a rich backstory of each fragrance. Take, for example, a range formulated by a young Taiwanese perfumer who splits his time between caring for his elderly father and tinkering away on macerations in his apartment upstairs. Ko finds these artisans on his travels across the globe, at trade fairs and sometimes even on the street.
His customers run the gamut from dentists and lawyers, to jewellery designers, to teenage boys with their mums on the hunt for their first fragrance. Operating by appointment only, Ko has resisted opening an online arm of the business, saying he believes customers need to experience a scent before committing to it, as opposed to the “blind buys” that have become increasingly common.
“They want the feelings, they want the story, they want everything, so we can spend one or two hours talking to our customers,” says Ko. “And when you wear the perfume, you can feel that the energy the perfumers did when they made it.”
In 2024, fragrance is big business. Luxury conglomerate LVMH’s fragrance division grew by 13 per cent in 2023 compared to 2022, while Inter Parfum, a global manufacturer and distributor for brands like DKNY and Guess, reported record sales of $636 million in the first half of 2023. MECCA’s head of fragrance, Virginia Woodger, says their fragrance customer base has grown by 50 per cent over the past 12 months. She says this is being driven by social media trends, as well as a desire for more “accessible” fragrance formats like hair and body mists, particularly among younger demographics.
But buyers aren’t just hungry for any old perfume; they want something that sets them apart.
“One in three MECCA customers view having a ‘unique’ scent as important,” says Woodger, “while almost 50 per cent say they use fragrances to reflect their personal style.”
There’s a name for these unique fragrances: niche perfume. The term is thrown around a lot, but generally refers to independent brands that produce scents outside the mainstream.
Jocelyn Fullerton is a Sydney-based perfumer who founded independent fragrance label Cult of Scent in 2008. Niche fragrance houses, she explains, were abundant in the 1920s before giving way to bigger companies, many of which still dominate the market today. Around the 1980s, niche fragrance began to see a revival, as perfumers challenged the safe formulations put out by big houses
Unlike mainstream perfume, where celebrity faces and big budget marketing are often valued more than the scent itself, Fullerton says niche perfumery is less about commerciality and more about telling a story.
Indeed, such formulations often blur the line between scent and art. Fullerton herself is often commissioned by artists to create scents for poetry readings, exhibitions and film screenings.
“We just want to release something we think is interesting. We’re not going, ‘Oh, this perfume was a big, I’m going to make a whole bunch of things that smell like that because it’s going to sell’.”
Social media and the internet have supercharged the boom, diffusing niche fragrance to a largely younger audience where scent is as much a marker of personal taste as it is a status symbol.
Billie Stimpson founded Pink Manor Decant Club in 2021, an online platform where they share decants and samples of niche fragrances from their collection.
Stimpson came of age at a time when the internet revolutionised the way perfume was spoken about and shared.
“In the early 2000s there was this class of amateur envisages who weren’t really compelled by this medium where there was just a total lack of real discourse and engagement with it,” says Stimpson. “Pink Manor Decant Club was an attempt to make more accessible something that was an inaccessible creative medium.”
Scents on the website are categorised by seasons, as well as those from discontinued or vintage lines and queer, women and BIPOC creatives. And the descriptions are evocative without the self-serious tone that often underlies copy for big brands.
“All of these specialised terms and this technical knowledge are part of what makes it inaccessible, and what is accessible remains really boring in that it’s just what’s available at chemists or department stores and continues to represent a form of perfumery that’s been created by fashion houses and celebrities.”
Callum Brown, an 18-year-old from Western Sydney, started getting into fragrance late last year, spurred by what he was seeing online.
The first perfume he bought for himself was Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male Elixir, a vanilla-heavy scent launched in 1995 that’s enjoyed a renewed popularity thanks to TikTok. He’s since amassed around 50 perfumes, but says he is trying to cut back on growing his collection for now.
“Perfume says a lot about a person. It’s about finding ways to express myself and what other people smell like which is really interesting to me.”
Brown has recently completed his Certificate III in fitness at TAFE and works part-time at a perfume shop, where he says a lot of his customers are teenage boys, like himself, most of whom seek out sweet, vanilla fragrances. “They like to smell nice and impress their friends and the people around them. But also it gives them a lot of confidence.”
Jessica Tate, co-founder of niche fragrance boutique Lore Perfumery in Melbourne’s Fitzroy, has noticed a marked uptick in younger customers of both genders over the past few years.
These younger buyers, she says, are less interested in the gendered divisions that have traditionally defined perfume – florals and sweet scents for women, leather and oud for men.
“I’m really loving that these younger guys are shopping and buying more sweet, fruity and floral fragrances as well. It’s moving away from that old school stereotype of men’s and women’s fragrances.”
For Brown, who started a TikTok account last year to document his passion, perfume has helped him feel more confident in his own skin. A fierce mental health advocate, he hopes his online platform helps other young men do the same.
Lucy Blore, a 27-year-old remedial massage student from Melbourne, has also observed first-hand the fragrance boom on TikTok. Blore grew up loving perfume, and has an affinity for gourmand fragrances (scents that smell like food), a category that’s becoming increasingly popular.
“It was a bit of a mind-blowing moment when I discovered [gourmand fragrances] because it showed me there is just so much more available. And because they also smell like food, there’s that real sensory sort aspect to them for me.”
She likens her love of perfume to hobbies. “You have people who are really into music and who are really into food, and fragrance for me is just another sensory experience that adds another layer of enjoyment to life.”
On her TikTok accountBlore makes an effort to showcase cheaper perfumes, particularly given her younger audience, as well as those from independent brands.
“It’s a sensory experience, one that’s really enjoyable,” she says. “I think everybody should be able to enjoy that. I don’t think it should be limited to budget.”
TikTok too has connected her to other perfume hobbyists, who she often exchanges fragrances with. “There’s just a really nice sense of community,” she says.
As a retailer, Tate also values this sense of connection. At Lore, she’s passionate about breaking down the fear that can often dominate fragrance houses. “We’re really focused on inclusivity – just because somebody smells something in a fragrance doesn’t mean they’re right or wrong,” she says. It might not be listed, but whatever we smell is whatever we smell.”
For perfumers, as well as consumers, the recent niche fragrance boom has been about breaking down the gilded walls of the notoriously insular perfume industry.
Fullerton, who went on to train at The Grasse Institute of Perfumery in France, says there has traditionally been a strict pathway for those who want a career in the industry. However, she says things are slowly starting to change.
Callum Rory Mitchell, a Melbourne-based creative, founded Perdrisat during lockdown. Being self-taught, he admits he felt an element of imposter syndrome, but found information via a community of fellow perfumers in a group on Facebook and in online forums like Reddit.
‘It appeals to people who actually just want the joy in experiencing something that’s weird.’
Perfumer Jocelyn Fullerton, on the trend for wacky perfumes like popcorn and sweat
“It’s [the internet] weakened the stronghold that classic perfume education had because all of these people are starting to share information,” he says. “Fragrance is quite classical; there are structures that people adhere to. However, the way I did it was so chaotic it almost felt like painting.”
Despite the imposter syndrome, Mitchell thinks his lack of classical training has helped him think outside the box and break free from the burden of tradition.
His perfume F— Boy, a playful ode to the now notorious archetype one either loves or hates, has been the collection’s runaway success. The fragrance blew up on TikTok late last year, likely due to its cheeky name and “cocaine accord”.
Mitchell’s creation smells like inhaling the scent of one too many pina coladas – through a cocaine-encrusted nostril. That final note, he says, was a last-minute addition.
“I wasn’t trying to be a revolutionary or push boundaries,” Mitchell says of its conception. “I literally was just like, we’ve all met a fuck boy. And this is kind of what they’re like.”
While fragrance is often thought of as a tool of attraction, within the niche perfume category are scents designed to challenge or repel.
Reddit’s dedicated perfume community, r/fragrance, has over 1.2 million members and harbours enthusiasts that range from the conventional to the downright weird. A smattering of recent posts, for example, include requests for “dirty fragrances” that “smell like rotting fruits and wood”, “dry cement” or “recommendations for smelling like an evil gay vampire”.
From chloroform to semen to petrichor (the smell of wet earth after rainfall), these scents defy any sense of commerciality but have an enduring appeal in the community.
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Tate thinks the desire for challenging or strange perfumes stems from a primal place.
“It’s that scent that you can feel a connection to, and you’re not sure if you like it or not, but it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to kind of go back and smell it’ because at the end of the day we are all animals, and we are all attracted to bodily senses.”
“Perfume is a journey as well and people want to be taken out of their every day,” explains Fullerton.
“I think sometimes that kind of stuff really appeals to people who want to thumb their nose at what good taste might be.”
“It appeals to people who actually just want the joy in experiencing something that’s weird.”
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