Confessions From a Perfume Obsessive
I have a confession: I have a minor obsession with niche fragrance. I’m not entirely sure when it happened. Probably back in 2020 when a lot of us lost our minds a little bit, seeking an injection of dopamine to sustain us in a bleak time. It started with a discovery pack bought on a whim, then a deep dive into “perfumetok,” followed by samples (oh the samples) of every variety, and finally a small collection of bottles artfully displayed on my vanity, as though that was their plan all along.
Now, for the uninitiated, I don’t mean what you get at the department store, where you walk through a cloud of pungent overspray so thick it sticks to your eyebrows. No, I’m into the kind of niche smells that have names like “Sheep’s Meadow”, “Silken Tent” and “Fat Electrician”, with notes of rice pudding, apricot, vetiver, or….jeans (not kidding, that’s a real note).
I love this world of weird smells so much because it is so hard to pin down. I started out online and ordered samples of what I thought I would love. Skin scents, to begin with, with notes of amber and paper, maybe clean laundry. I’d get them in the mail, swatch them, find scents that drew me in, dot them on my skin, only to find notes of…cat pee? Or, oddly, rotten crayons. Fragrance is so personal, not only to preference but to how the scent interacts with our skin on a chemical level, changing like a chameleon based on the individual. On you, my cat pee scent might smell like summer laundry on the line.
I find this utterly fascinating in our overly digitized era, where we “optimize the self” by tweaking, filtering and editing every visible dimension of our self-presentation, constructing versions of ourselves that persist beyond the true self. When I was poking around this concept of selfhood and technology, I ran across philosopher Marshall McLuhan. He argued that technologies are not neutral tools we use to express ourselves, but extensions of the body that reorganize perception itself. In his view, consciousness can’t be separated from techne, from the making, mediating, and material conditions that shape how we experience being human. Over time, our dominant media environments don’t just carry meaning, they teach us what kinds of meaning are possible.
Digital technologies have done just that with ruthless efficiency. They have essentially colonized selfhood, rendering it into content: visible, persistent, searchable, and optimizable. We’re hyper-aware of the individual as an image and are rewarded for clarity, coherence, and repeatability online. Perfume, however, operates in a different register altogether. Unlike the visual element, scent cannot be fully manipulated in digital forms. Sure, we can put together an algorithm that can identify your preference patterns, suggest new scents, even take feedback to adapt. But the alchemy of how a scent unfolds on the skin remains stubbornly personal.
Fragrance is not simply “beheld,” it is experienced, both by the wearer and by others through proximity. And in that experience we each encounter things like comfort, desire, unease, disgust, recognition or nostalgia. Scent encourages a relational dynamic between people that emerges only in the space between bodies. It shapes how close someone stands, how long they linger, what they remember later. If the digital encourages the self to become legible, fragrance keeps the self embodied. It doesn’t merely represent identity; it acts on bodies. It bypasses language and image, working instead through memory, mood, and sensation. It is not consumed at a distance, but absorbed in close quarters. In McLuhan’s terms, it is a medium that refuses abstraction.
For me, in a culture increasingly oriented around perfection and that dreaded “optimization”, perfume is quietly subversive. It pushes up against how controlled and managed we are online. To wear fragrance is to accept that some aspects of how you are perceived will remain opaque, even to you. Wearing fragrance requires relinquishing the fantasy of total self-control in favor of real, complicated presence. To choose scent is not to simply to “smell nice,” but to allow yourself to be encountered, interpreted, and sometimes misread in real time.
If you’ve ever accidentally (or purposefully!) worn a scent that is full beast-mode, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Scent offers a different model of how we present the self: one based on presence, risk, and relational meaning rather than visibility and control.
That resistance to control, more so than even novelty or luxury or aesthetics, may be why niche fragrance feels so compelling to me right now. Perfume starts to feel like a counterpoint to the dominant digital ways so many of us present “the self.” It offers a form of expression that has not yet been fully domesticated by platforms or metrics. One that happens in the shared air of the real world.
And for the record: I found I like smelling like fancy French pastries, and a very specific 1990s coffee shop scent that’s tinged with cream, a little concrete and woodsmoke. So if we’re together and you suddenly smell caramelized sugar or feel the urge to read some beat poetry, that might just be me.
Notes & Influences: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media; Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation; Camilla Sarra, Is Perfume the Last Truly Personal Style Choice?