It’s Friday night at New York niche fragrance boutique Stéle, and a crowd of 30-plus “frag heads” are in their natural state of smelling, sample-swapping and talking really passionately with their hands. 

For many in attendance, the event — the store’s third in roughly as many weeks, hosted in celebration of Clue Perfumery’s latest eau de parfum launch, Dandelion Butter — is something of a reunion. 

“The crowd at these events is always interesting,” said Ronit Kory, a Brooklyn-based fragrance lover who works in FiDi and has been coming to Stéle at least twice a month since learning of the store last year via “Perfume Room,” the fragrance podcast hosted by Emma Vernon, who, of course, is also in the room. “You have the hobbyists, the content creators — then there are the industry people and indie perfumers, a lot of whom bring their own samples, and then you have the podcasters.” 

Indeed, the event — without trying to be — is a real-life coming together of some of the most ardent next-gen fragrance enthusiasts and creatives who have helped create a thriving and multifaceted fragrance community in the post-pandemic years, mostly by simply talking about the world of scent online in ways that previously haven’t been so accessible to the masses. 

The timing of this boom in fragrance media and enthusiasts is congruent with that of the fragrance category itself, which has soared in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns. During the first half of 2021 alone, prestige fragrance sales surged 82 percent, according to Circana, and fragrance has continued to outpace the growth of every other beauty category across both the prestige and mass markets since.

“During the pandemic, there was this huge shift where people who previously thought of fragrance as a nonessential started to pivot,” said Linda Levy, president of The Fragrance Foundation, adding that beyond those whose senses of taste or smell were impacted due to COVID-19 infection, others simply “started wanting to research and to understand fragrance brands and their storytelling; to buy their discovery sets. It was a period that put big brands on an equal playing field as small brands, because everybody had to be able to tell their story from their own Instagram or social media platforms.” 

While fragrance enthusiasts of years past may have flocked mainly to Fragrantica or Reddit to discuss their latest findings and dive into scent-related rabbit holes, their options — both online and in-person — are far more plentiful today. 

“Before, you’d have to be on the perfume blogs or have a favorite person at a department store to talk to to get information about fragrance,” said Steven Gontarski, manager of Luckyscent-owned Scent Bar’s Los Angeles stores. “Now that this info is more accessible, a lot of younger people in their 20s and early 30s who might have geeked out on other things in the past — art, music, DJing — have turned their attention and creative juices to perfume.” 

For Vernon, a longtime comedian-slash-matchmaker who started “Perfume Room” in 2021 as one of the earliest shows in its category featuring guests such as master perfumer Olivier Cresp and Régime des Fleurs founder Alia Raza, podcasting has only been the beginning. 

Book Club, but Make It Perfume

The New York-based scent enthusiast has also launched Smell Club, which is basically a virtual book club but for fragrance, wherein roughly 90 attendees pay just under $40 to smell and discuss curated, Luckyscent-provided perfume sample packs together. She also introduced a scent-based live dating show, “Smells Like Love,” last Valentine’s Day, which saw three contestants compete for one eligible single over the course of three rounds. 

“They smelled each others’ armpits blindfolded, smelled each others’ signature scents. The single who was picking the date got to hear how the daters talk about fragrance — it was mind, body and soul,” said Vernon, who is already plotting a 2026 return for the show, which drew more than 150 attendees with tickets priced at $25. 

She’s also one of a growing number of perfume lovers who host frequent “scent swaps,” which are organized meetups — sometimes paid, sometimes free — wherein attendees exchange fragrances from their collections. Rules vary, but Vernon’s are: “You have to bring an authentic fragrance — so no bootlegs — it has to be at least 80 percent full, and it can’t have gone bad,” she said, adding that fragrances that are up for grabs are all placed on a table, then labeled and moved to a different table once claimed. 

“I see fragrance similarly to how a lot of people think about astrology — it’s a point of connection,” said Vernon, who has more than 200 full-size fragrances stored in a cabinet in her bedroom, and countless more sample and travel sizes scattered throughout her apartment. “Scent is just such a cool way to editorialize who you are or who you aspire to be — it’s this unspoken language.” 

At the same time, there are few things fragrance lovers enjoy more than talking about their love of fragrance. 

“Back in the day, if you wore the same perfume as another person — you had beef,” said Sable Yong, a former Allure editor who cohosts the “Smell Ya Later” scent podcast alongside Tynan Sinks, adding that, “Now, if I encounter someone who has a perfume that I also wear, it’s a bonding thing, where it’s like ‘Oh, we love the same thing’ — that narrative has flipped.”

During her high school days, Yong witnessed the ways in which fragrance often said something about its wearer: “There were the girls who were the Tommy girls; the girls who wore Ralph Lauren Polo Blue, the girls who wore Lolita Lempicka,” she rattled off in a fashion not unlike that of Janis in “Mean Girls” when detailing the high-school social hierarchy to new-girl Cady. It makes Yong laugh now, but at the time these dynamics made her “enamored with the idea of self-expression and self-becoming through scent,” she said.  

Yong still freelances as a beauty writer in addition to cohosting weekly(ish) episodes of “Smell Ya Later,” whose guests have included Francisco Costa, Dedcool founder Carina Chaz, neurologist Mo Costandi — who dove into his years-long research on the smell of death for listeners — and more since launching the show in 2020. 

The Subculture of Fragrance

Like Vernon, Yong and Sink extend efforts to cultivate their community beyond the online realm via in-person events, with the pair most recently hosting a May scent swap in New York where  the first 50 attendees received goodie bags filled with beauty products from brands like Hero Cosmetics, Nette and others who donated product for the meetup.  

“Fragrance, to me, feels like a community that is affirming and optimistic in this era where subcultures are dissolving,” said Yong. “Beauty people as a whole love to gather, but the goals aren’t always the same. Fragrance people, we’re here for the pleasure of smells — we’re not here to learn how to get snatched.”

Jake Levy, who opened Stéle’s first Williamsburg store in 2024 alongside his partner, Matt Belanger, and this year introduced a NoLIta location, echoed the sentiment. 

“Creating space for fragrance enthusiasts at Stéle is about building community and sharing the art of scent in person,” he said, adding that these events attract “a mix of passionate collectors, curious newcomers and creatives — all united by a love for unique fragrances.”

Clue’s Laura Oberwetter, who cofounded the Chicago-based brand with Caleb Vanden Bloom, said she approaches event hosting “like a gallery opening — these events are about more than selling a bottle of perfume.” 

A 6-foot-tall butter stick sculpture, perfume note-inspired canapés and floral arrangements, and a bespoke short film for the fragrance by Jake Nokovic were among the attractions at the Dandelion Butter launch party. 

“I was a huge lurker [of the fragrance community] since like 2012 — I very much thrived in the anonymity that Fragrantica provides,” said Oberwetter, who, since introducing Clue in 2023, has become an active member of the fragrance circles she and many others watched flourish online for years. “At Stéle, I had this freaky moment of looking up and seeing Emma Vernon talking to Tynan Sinks, talking to Arabelle Sicardi [beauty writer and Perfumed Pages founder] — these people who I have had online relationships with for what feels like forever, but now I’m in the same room and we all know each other, which is weird in this joyous way.” 

The pandemic emergence of TikTok niche, #PerfumeTok, also catalyzed the growth of the fragrance community by democratizing scent and perfume knowledge and incentivizing a new generation of collectors. 

“You don’t need to be a perfumer or have gone to perfumery school — you can have millions of followers on TikTok simply because people like the way you talk about things,” said Bettina O’Neill, executive vice president of business development and merchandising at Scentbird. 

The fragrance subscription platform’s customer base has boomed in tandem with the growth of the online fragrance community, counting more than 1 million subscribers today, up from roughly 350,000 five years ago. “Our subscribers definitely want to engage with their peers through reviews, on social media; it turns this individual exploration into a shared sensory journey.” 

The Infinity-Stone Factor

Twenty-three-year-old Luca Mornet, who counts more than 400,000 followers on TikTok, is one of many male content creators bringing detailed fragrance and collection reviews to the platform. 

“When I make fragrance content, I describe how a fragrance makes me feel — if it’s something sexy, if it’s flirty, if I would wear it on a date — if I can put a place to it, I will,” said Mornet, a Slovenia-born Fashion Institute of Technology graduate who moved around often during his childhood, spending years in Warsaw, Paris, Vienna, the Netherlands, Milan and China before arriving in New York. 

Bleu de Chanel is Mornet’s ultimate classic — he estimates he has emptied at least six bottles of the scent since discovering it when he was 15 — but with 127 fragrances in his collection and counting, he’s also one to experiment. 

“I call them my Infinity Stones,” he said, gesturing to his 15-plus Tom Ford eau de parfum bottles. “I want them all.” 

Meanwhile Vernon, whose 2021 “What Your First Date Perfume Says About You” video was one of the earliest in the #PerfumeTok genre, has been a collector since acquiring her first perfume — Gap’s freesia-infused Dream eau de toilette — in elementary school. 

Her love of scent follows in the footsteps of her grandmother’s, who was a fan of what Vernon refers to as “chokeout” perfumes: Van Cleef & Arpels First Eau de Parfum; Paloma Picasso; Bijan by Bijan — those “fun, floral, animalic scents of the ‘80s,” she said, adding, “one of my seminal scent memories is dousing myself in her perfume and then walking back into the living room, as a 4-year-old reeking of these animalic scents, as if no one would know what I just did.” 

For Yong — strict parents inadvertently helped spark a passion for the category. 

“I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup until I was 18, so fragrance was the one beauty thing I was allowed to play with — and I really went with that,” she said. Indeed, Yong’s passion for the category has transcended just writing, talking and organizing around fragrance: last year, she launched one of her own. 

Called Die Hot With a Vengeance and inspired by Yong’s book of personal essays of the same name, the $185 eau de parfum taps notes of grapefruit, patchouli, orris root and leather. It’s a “femme fatale, antihero, black cat,” kind of fragrance developed alongside perfumer Joey Rosin, who was a sales associate at D.S.& Durga and, as fate would have it, longtime “Smell Ya Later” listener who struck up a conversation with Yong one day when she strolled into the store. 

“The fragrance community, it seems rather big but it also seems small,” said Franco Wright, cofounder of Luckyscent. “Everyone’s tightly knit; everyone sort of knows each other — whether it’s in-person or from email exchanges or being online and knowing a creator or a brand owner through a friend of a friend — it’s a small world.” 

And, like the category itself, one that continues to grow exponentially as new generations discover the allure of fragrance.