If you look at what’s trending among perfume connoisseurs, it would seem that people no longer want to smell good. What people are seeking instead is the strange, the avant-garde, or to be a little bit stinky.

Perfume enthusiasts are favouring the strange over the fresh, with brands like Marlou coming into their own with animalic scents meant to recall bodily odours and sensual encounters like the somewhat infamous Ambilux. There’s been a move towards metallic fragrance notes from niche to mainstream brands, with some consumers craving a cyborgian scent-cloud. Niche perfume house Toskovat rocketed to fame with their unsettling scents and seemingly wild fragrance notes (credit cards and priests’ clothes, anyone?). They are best known for their scent Inexcusable Evil, which features notes of blood and iodine, and attempts to capture the scent of war. Even gourmand scents are getting a makeover, as perfumers move away from the sweet and fruity towards other edible, but perhaps less traditionally wearable, notes. This includes Versatile Paris’s Culot Thé, with its notes of tea, garlic and wasabi, or Bohoboco’s Polish Potatoes, which features notes of beetroot and potato.

Perfumery is moving away from strictly ‘pretty’ scents and making space for unique artistry and experimentation. But this move begs the question: who is allowed to smell strange or, to some palates, even bad?

Scent has a long history of being used as a means of stoking racial or class prejudice, justifying oppression and ghettoisation based on perceived ‘bad’ smells from some groups. So what happens when smells typically associated with bad hygiene and stigmatised foods or jobs start being sold back to us as avant-garde cosmetics? It becomes clear that certain scents are only acceptable, or indeed aspirational, when they are connected to a certain kind of person: usually white, affluent, and possessing social and economic capital.

In 2024, Dr Ally Louks shared her doctoral thesis on olfactory politics on X and received extreme backlash for apparently “making smell racist”. But this demonstrates that scent is part of the axis of oppression, which remains naturalised and therefore hidden. “White supremacy drew a very detailed nomenclature connecting non-whites and foul odour” in the colonial age, says Françoise Vergès, senior fellow researcher in Race and Racialisation at University College London. She explains that slavery and colonisation relied on the delineation of one group as ‘lesser’, and linking non-white bodies with foul odour and uncleanliness was one way to do so. There are numerous travelogues from European colonisers and slavers detailing the supposed ‘innate’ odour of people who were forced into profoundly dehumanising and unhygienic conditions – the conditions of white supremacy, thereby reinforcing its stereotypes.

Scent-based prejudice goes all the way back to Socrates, who believed that slaves smelled different to other classes. George Orwell also outlined in The Road to Wigan Pier (1936) that “the real secret of class distinctions in the West” can be summed up by “the lower classes’ smell”, a statement which he then went on to challenge. More recently, Bong Joon-Ho’s film Parasite (2019), which explored wealth inequality in Seoul, shows that the upper-class Park family perceive members of the lower-class Kim family they employ as having an unpleasant scent, like old food or rags. But now, we see previously denigrated scents rehabilitated and sold as edgy commodities.

This changing perception of scents is nothing new. Historian William Tullett points out that at the beginning of the 18th century, Native Americans were described as “sweet”, but following the Seven Years War, and the growing view of Native Americans as “savage” by European colonisers, they were said to produce a “stench”. Additionally, there is historical precedent for the perception of scents changing as they crossed racial or class boundaries. Rising in class status and adopting European practices was said to eliminate ‘African’ odours. Similarly, the scents of animal grease so reviled when worn by Native American or African peoples were praised when found within the pricey perfumes and pomades of Europe, with one anonymous contributor to the London Magazine and Monthly Chronologer in 1741 stating that the greases and oils used by other cultures were “not quite so fragrant as the perfumes used by our beaus and ladies”.

Aside from racial and class differences, the main distinction between the use of the ingredients was perceived refinement. Bear grease in London was “clarified”, and Tullett points out that the “quasi-alchemical work of the perfumer” turned crude grease into coveted perfume. A similar process is taking place today. Recently, we’ve seen the Western perfume market embrace oud as if it were a previously unknown ingredient, when in fact it was used in the Middle East for millennia and viewed by Europeans as far too pungent until it was reimagined by Western perfume houses. Perfumers, marketers and copy-writers are changing previously stigmatised scents into desirable commodities that signify refined and cutting-edge taste, that demonstrate an appreciation for the ‘difficult’ and obscene, much like transgressive literature or film.

What gives these perfumes their edgy quality is the incongruence between their scent and who is wearing them or where they are being worn. A put-together fashionista smelling like gasoline is boundary-pushing and transgressive, which brands like Serviette and Sylhouette Parfums are capitalising on. But a working-class tradesman smelling of gasoline, metal or burning plastic (all notes used by niche perfume houses) might be viewed as indicative of poor hygiene or an inability to fully escape their working conditions. A cumin note might read as sexy for fans of Akro’s Night or Jouissance’s Les Cahiers Secrets, or be vilified as the scent of lingering cooking spices for others. 

This is not to criticise these scents and claim they are irredeemably problematic; they could hopefully broaden our olfactory tastes, and erode scent-based prejudice. In fact, some perfumers like D.Grayi are directly challenging these problems: their scents are influenced by the founders’ Vietnamese and Korean backgrounds and feature notes like durian fruit (a famously ‘stinky’ and stigmatised food) in multiple of their compositions. This is ultimately a good thing if it helps us think critically about the ways that challenging scents, previously treated with disgust, are now seen as a marker of superior taste.