“We like who you’re becoming…” writes Dedcool on its website, beneath its coveted canister of detergent ( or ‘Dedtergent’). The package is ivory, with cloud illustrations and zeitgeisty tangerine font. The product itself smells of bergamot, moss, cardamom and star anise. It’s also quadruple the price of a regular supermarket non-bio of the same size. 

Clean smells different nowadays. Once, it might have been ‘enough’ to shower and keep on top of housework. Housepride smelled like Dettol, fabric softener, maybe a lit candle. But now, prestige fragrance brands are distilling their scent, and status, into everything from car diffusers to kitchen sprays. There’s Diptyque’s La Droguerie, offering £35 fig and cedarwood multi-surface spray and orange blossom dish soap. Maison Francis Kurkdjian – the house behind Baccarat Rouge 540, dubbed ‘the smell of wealth’ – now sells fabric conditioner at £40 a bottle. High-street brand Rituals sells white basil-scented car wipes, nine times the price of supermarket alternatives. 

For fragrance houses, the shift makes sense. While experiential luxury is booming, cosmetics underperformed in 2024, according to Bain & Company. As the middle class shrinks under the cost of living crisis, embedding fragrance into essentials and turning cleaning into a ‘wellbeing experience’ is a smart pivot.

For consumers, motivations for buying these new little luxuries range from dislike of “soapy, artificial” detergents to making cleaning feel less grim. Daniella, 31, is a civil servant and a self-proclaimed domestic perfectionist who uses everything from candles to dog deodorisers when guests come over, says her habit is rooted in childhood shame, from when a wealthy friend said her home “smelled like dogs”. Though she sometimes uses scent to shift the mood at home, most of her investment is for guests’ benefit. She likens it to “putting deodorant on your house to cover up your insecurities.”

These products act as an “entry-level luxury”, like an £11.50 Prada Caffe croissant: expensive objectively, but a much cheaper route to Prada-adjacent status than a handbag. “People understandably want to feel part of an in-group,” says Dr Ally Louks, an academic spearheading conversations about the politics of smell. Fragrance has long been a gateway to brands like Chanel, Dior and Hermès – and cleaning products are the logical next step. Riani Kenyon, an anthropologist at Canvas8, points to the lipstick effect, “where people trade big purchases for small luxuries during economic hardship”.

But what are the implications of these new, luxury cleaning products? Are they quietly redefining what ‘clean’ means, and who gets to participate? “High-end fragrance marketing is inherently exclusionary,” says Louks. She adds that this glamourised sterility could play to the “long-held middle-class preoccupation” with purity. “The history of the concept of cleanliness is intimately tied up with classism, racism and colonialism… It would go a long way to include people who’ve historically been marginalised as ‘unclean’ and foul-smelling in campaigns.”

Because what smells “clean” to one person might smell different to another. Scent associations are arbitrary, shaped by conditioning. “In Indonesia, clean smells like coffee, gourmands and rich, heavy notes,” says Vicki Last of Carvansons, the fragrance house behind the smell of many mass market products. “In Spain, it’s more fruity and juicy.” Pine, used in toilet cleaners, can provoke recoil in a different context. “People might say ‘it smells like toilets in here.’”

This new wave of luxury, ‘clean girl’-inspired products champion a homogenous kind of hygiene. There is no trace of sweat or unmopped floor, or even a whisper of the ‘wrong’ kind of clean smell: soapy skin, minty breath, or a newly bleached bathroom. “Gone are the days of synthetic lemon from a £2 Cif bottle,” says Danny Leung, founder of luxury retailer Deetorp. “People don’t want cheap plastic ruining their aesthetic.”

But as the tectonic plates of cleanliness shift, where do new standards leave those who can’t keep up? “I think there’s a danger of making these products too expensive,” adds Yosh Han, perfumer and advocate for the decolonise scent movement, who thinks people shouldn’t be made to feel bad if they use drugstore or mass-market supermarket brands. Still, she says she’s celebrating a “wonderful evolution of the fragrance industry,” adding that “there’s enough consumer demand to make their everyday products smell better”.

Fragrance enthusiasts across income brackets will always seek reinvention, and brands are simply meeting that demand. “We can move on from pine, citrus, lavender, eucalyptus,” says Han. But the point remains that we should do so with caution and inclusivity. Because really, our relationship to fragrance is never just about scent. It’s about belonging, identity, and who gets left behind when we decide what it means to smell clean.