When I go out dancing, I spray a couple of spritzes of In Love With Everything by Imaginary Authors on my neck, catching notes of raspberry and fruit punch in the queue, on the dance floor, and on my train home. I feel like a girl in 1980s Florida, getting tipsy at the roller rink. When I go to read in the park, I put on Odette by Guamamina; notes of rose, grapefruit, and sparkling water occasionally creep up as I lie in the grass, read poetry, and listen to Tchaikovsky. To write, I wear Clue’s Warm Bulb. The dust, paper, and tobacco accords really bring my inner Jack Kerouac to life. But my signature scent remains A Little Secret by Imaginary Authors. Notes of cherry, marzipan, and rum smell like a diner booth at midnight—which tracks, since I bought it because of a targeted Instagram ad describing it as “the Twin Peaks perfume.” Now, I’m a fiend for a good marketing scheme, but this one actually delivered. In a way that’s hard to describe, A Little Secret feels completely and totally like me. Like I’ve worn it my whole life.
This hobby of mine, becoming different people through the way I make myself smell, has not emerged in a vacuum or even from a particularly personal interest. The perfume market, and specifically the niche fragrance market, has boomed over the last 5 years, and with it the content centering on it online. Like many other young women with an interest in fashion and beauty, it was only a matter of time until this trend hit my algorithm. Niche perfumes—those built around unconventional notes, released in limited runs, and marketed less like mass products and more like art—are experiencing a real surge in demand, especially among Gen Z. According to Forbes and Scento, the niche fragrance industry is growing nearly twice as fast as its mass market counterpart. On Instagram and TikTok, creators present thoughtfully arranged trays of perfume bottles, grouping them under highly specific labels such as “fragrances for love spells” or “perfumes for melancholy.” So, why is this? And what does it tell us about our relationship to beauty and consumption?
Perfume is uniquely situated in the beauty industry. It is history’s oldest beauty product, depending on who you ask. Archaeologists trace fragrance-making back roughly 5,000 years to Mesopotamia and Egypt, where the first recorded perfumer, a chemist named Tapputi, was documented on cuneiform tablets around 1200 BCE. Yet it is distinctly different from makeup or hair products in that it’s not visual but sensory. In an industry increasingly organized around the demands of the camera, scent is the one product still built for a sense no algorithm can index. A choice of perfume is far more subtle and personal; who gets close enough to smell it is often a question of intimacy. Niche fragrance, then, is the rare beauty choice that isn’t made for the room; it doesn’t promise to correct a flaw or fill in a lack of yours. You’re adding a layer to your personality that is for you and those you let into your proximity. The success of Glossier’s You (“Your skin but better”) or Lush’s Lust (“Sex in a bottle”) only highlights the private nature of our sense of smell.
That doesn’t make niche fragrance apolitical or exempt it from the same commercial machinery as everything else. It’s still a $200 bottle, still a brand, still something to be seen consuming, in the case of #NichePerfumeTok. But it might explain why it feels different to the people buying it. As with so many of our personalized choices, perfume is first and foremost an expression of how we see ourselves. “Scent is your first subconscious impression of someone—in that sense, what fragrance one wears speaks volumes about who an individual is and how they wish to be perceived,” beauty editor and fragrance content creator Derek Deng (@derekdengg) tells me. Derek is something of an authority on this topic; his thorough research on the fragrance habits of different identity groups is presented in his “fragrance matrix” posts, which offer a fresh and creative perspective on the ways our identity shapes our choices (and vice versa). The personas we adopt through our scent can be highly specific, Derek lays out: “…But your fragrance is also an exercise in world-building. Are you a Le Labo boy in Williamsburg with a wabi-sabi bed frame? Or a Rhode-obsessed Pilates princess that only wears Parfums de Marly Delina? Your fragrance is part of your outfit, an invisible styling choice that communicates taste, aspiration, and the world you want to belong to.” You are therefore not just picking a perfume but picking a self.
As the trend shifts away from big designer fragrances toward the eclectic scents of smaller perfume houses, what does this signal about our self-expression? There’s something more specific at play than just “fragrance as identity.” Historically, smelling good meant smelling pleasant—florals, clean musks, and whatever registered as universally appealing to others. Fragrance was a courtship tool, aimed outward. Niche fragrance escapes that logic. The barnyard, skin musk, dirt, or smoke notes that define the genre aren’t trying to please a room. Smelling “weird” or different is now desirable precisely because it signals hyper-individuality. For a generation obsessed with being special, fragrances that need to be narrated to be legible are the perfect product, allowing the consumer to convey a personal mythology.
But individuality isn’t the only identity being negotiated through scent. Niche notes also manage to move the whole idea of a perfume away from something rigidly gendered and limiting, which is part of why the genre resonates so specifically with queer people. Department store fragrance counters have long operated on a strict binary, sorting scent into two aisles the same way they sort clothing racks. “Fragrances that read as queer to me are fragrances that exist outside of that binary, resisting neat categorization,” Derek tells me, pointing to Le Labo’s Another 13—sheer, neutral, anchored by ambroxan—as an example. Specific gender-neutral notes, he says, carry that same charge simply by refusing to announce a gender at all. Queerness as signaled through scent is nothing new, though. “It’s a universal queer experience to find ways of telling other people you’re queer without saying, ‘I’m queer.'” Smell is one of those ways.” Derek’s viral fragrance matrix posts, then, are showing just how much scent correlates with the kind of queer you are or want to be.
So, is the cost of our self-expression… a $200 bottle of perfume? Probably. But that doesn’t disqualify it from feeling real or meaningful. Plenty of our identity markers today, unfortunately, come with a high price tag attached. The niche fragrance market has found Gen Z at a moment when we are most eager to be original and compelled to prove it online. At the end of the day, I wear my “Twin Peaks” perfume because I thoroughly enjoy smelling it on myself and maybe because I want to be perceived as someone who is part of the Twin Peaks universe, associated with those images—a narrative I have constructed about myself and want to carry into the world.
