Perfumers are exploring what the end of the world smells like – but what’s the appeal?
- THE TREND: Perfumes inspired by all things catastrophe, from AI taking over to a global pandemic and zombie apocalypse. Think: ashes, melting computers and wet soil.
- WHO’S DOING IT? Niche fragrance houses are – naturally – being the most experimental, but even Byredo has been getting in on the End Times action.
- HOW CAN I GET IT? Wait patiently for societal collapse and absorb its musty accords - or simply grab one of these boundary-pushing fragrances.
You may have noticed over the past few years that fragrances have been getting weird. Forget rose and patchouli: perfumes have been delving into abstract smells and moods from tennis balls and credit cards to cocaine and balloons. Others are envisaging apocalyptic scenarios through scent – and selling them out. If people are looking to microdose disaster, what does that say about our collective mood?
Agustine Zegers, a fragrance artist from Chile, runs Agar Olfactory, a scent lab which creates apocalyptic scenarios from the past, semi-present and future in perfume form. One feels particularly close to home: ‘bit bit’, which is based on the Covid-ridden year of 2021. “You’re quarantining in your apartment in a high-rise for the foreseeable future,” the blurb reads. “The only verdancy you’re interacting with is on a screen or in the form of a bland lettuce mix that gets delivered to you every Tuesday.” The notes are based around the smells you’d miss while locked down: chard, soil and bitter greens.
Another will take you back to 1999, when some people were looking nervously towards the turn of the millennium and the Y2K bug. This perfume, named ‘cero’, imagines these worries coming true: “As midnight strikes, entropy cascades every hour as time zones catch up to the disastrous inability to process the new millennium. Computers overheat in confusion… and hot wires melt their protective encasing.” Its notes reflect this machine-made potential horror: hot fax machine, mouse pad, mac carcass, tattered wire.
Then there’s the eerily apocalyptic scent Eau de Space. Originally commissioned by NASA to prepare astronauts for the void beyond Earth, it bottles the unsettling aromas of cosmic isolation. Wearers report notes of burnt steak, gunpowder and acrid urine, with some gagging when they sniffed it – making it less a perfume and more the scent of end times sealed in glass. Meanwhile, Zoologist’s T-Rex incorporates notes of charred wood and metallic rose oxide to evoke bloodlust and the meteor signalling the end of the dinosaurs’ deadly reign.
Doom-centred scents have even found their way into more mainstream perfumers’ offerings. Byredo’s Eleventh Hour is described as “the last perfume on Earth” and an exploration of the “smell of things ending”. Etat Libre D’Orange La Fin de Monde asks, “We’ve heard about the End Times and the Rapture. But one question remains: how will it smell?”
But why are fragrance houses honing in on End Times, something that feels hardly like a marketable or alluring prospect for consumers, particularly for a product that usually relies on storytelling around falling in love or spending the summer in Capri? Perhaps there’s a comparison with the rise of people watching Contagion during Covid (the 2011 film, in which the outbreak originated in China and where bats are implicated, soared into the Top Ten iTunes chart) while others were baking sourdough. Amid arguably unsettling times – regional wars, genocide, the rise of the far right, AI, climate collapse – people seem to look for either escapism or to lock into the terror, A Clockwork Orange style.
Art has historically reflected themes of ruin, ending and collapse during moments of perceived societal decay or transition. The Gothic revival as a response to the Industrial Revolution, for example, or expressionist cinema in Germany between the two world wars. 2025 has been a banner year for horror movies, from 28 Years Later to Weapons. Fashion this year has featured utility trousers and carabiners, in an echo of survivalist looks, while Diesel evoked a zombie apocalypse on the runway in Milan, spray painting smiles onto its milky-eyed models and using shredded denim.
For perfume-wearers, scents like these can be a way to tap into the darker recesses of their psyche. For the perfumers, including the Bucharest-based Toskovat, they engage the senses to make a statement about the world. The brand’s Inexcusable Evil perfume has notes of blood, bandages and burning flowers to suggest the smell of war. It’s a smell the brand’s creator said he “really despise[s]” and yet it’s perpetually sold out. “It was really not a pleasant thing to have to try to portray,” he tells Dazed, saying that curiosity plays a big part in why people are drawn to dark scents like these. “People want to consume something new – it doesn’t really matter what it is as long as it’s new.”
Zegers agrees, saying his community is eager to try something different and “engage with increasingly experimental olfaction beyond the offerings of the mass market – which tends to be divorced from the daily reality of societal collapse.”
And yet, increasingly, the fragrance industry won’t be able to stay divorced from wider world issues such as climate change, as the destruction of the natural world is already having an effect on the market. Natural raw materials are becoming harder to rely on, thanks to droughts impacting crop yields, particularly for ingredients jasmine and rose. Some perfumers have used scent to react to this, for example Brazilian perfumers O Boticário, who recreated the unpolluted scent of Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay – a plea to preserve the original smells of natural environments. Another project, 2014’s The Ephemeral Marvels Perfume Store, released a series of similarly endangered scents: coasts, coffee, honey, wine, eucalyptus, peanuts, ice and hardwood trees.
Smells have a particularly unique way of tapping into emotion and memory, becoming almost like speculative fiction that can shake us into action. “The magic of fragrance is that it quite literally enters and becomes you chemically,” says Zegers. “Agar Olfactory came from a desire to activate a potential of communion with other species and with rapid technological shifts through that mechanism. And as a way to mourn and integrate these increasingly rapid shifts.” Maybe it’s time to chuck the Lady Million and get something more disaster-related on our dressing tables.