Blood, concrete, petrol… what will perfumes of the future smell like?

The original Eau de Cologne, by Italian Giovanni Maria Farina, was a concoction of citrus and herbs, including oils of lemon, bitter orange, lavender, rosemary and thyme. Farina’s skill in producing a consistent fragrance with dozens of ingredients was seen as a technological breakthrough. Add to which citrus and herbs were a distinct upgrade from animal ass-crack.

Even for those not inclined to match Casanova’s 130-plus bedpost notches, his crusade for cutting-edge perfumes has never been more relevant, even 227 years after his death. I witnessed this myself at Bloom Perfumery, the London fragrance boutique lauded as one of the world’s premier destinations for indie perfume connoisseurs. On a recent Friday afternoon, fumeheads clustered along the glamorously bronzed horseshoe counter in ones and twos, fours and fives, hunkering down on flights of perfume bottles laid out for them by the shop’s deeply knowledgeable consultants. Towering shelves gleaming with rows of jewel-like bottles offered irresistible promise – a spirit refreshed, a change in fortune, a memory recaptured, a new you – with just a spritz. Even with eight consultants manning the decks there was an expectant queue building up behind the cordon outside the front door, waiting for their chance to smell some of Bloom’s 1,000-plus niche perfumes.

The mood inside hovered somewhere between reverent and decadent, with the hushed focus on huffing freshly sprayed scent strips punctuated by laughter and whoops of delight and surprise. The scene included perfumistas of all ages, all genders, all caught in an enraptured daze. There were fervent young men huddled around viral ugly-on-purpose brands such as Beaufort and Toskovat, comparing the gunpowder notes of Tonnerre with the blood and concrete of Inexcusable Evil. There was a gaggle of girls checking out the milky-peachy The Ghost in the Shell by Etat Libre d’Orange (“You’ve just seen into my soul”, one of them informed a perfume consultant). And, per the latest development in fragworld, there were 14-year-old boys intent on “smellmaxxing” (dropping wads on expensive scents to burnish status and identity), mums and dads bemusedly standing by as the relative merits of cherry and pineapple perfumes were hotly debated.

Not to get all Whitney Houston, but when it comes to perfume, I believe the children are our future. If the greatest love of all is indeed for one’s self, the kids have understood the assignment and are now roaming free-range across the limitless options for olfactive self-expression. Laurence Lienhard, SVP Consumer Marketing Insights & Strategy at Coty Inc, has clocked the shift: “Gen Z is completely changing the way people experience and talk about fragrance, making it personal, emotional and part of their everyday identity,” he told me. “Scents now connect with visual styles and cultural trends, like the ‘coquette’ aesthetic. Perfumes such as Gucci Flora or Kylie Cosmic aren’t just worn, they’re lived, with matching outfits, moods and even TikTok personas.”

Bloom perfume consultant Michael Sandamas credits TikTok for galvanising the next generation of niche fragrance hounds. “TikTok influencers perceived as more ‘underground’, include morebrandscents and milanscents, who have the clout to blow up provocative brands like Toskovat and Zoologist. There’s a trend for shock and horror right now, for perfumes that are statements.” Like Zoologist T-Rex, which smells like evidence of a crime destroyed by an electrical fire. Or Sécrétions Magnifiques by Etat Libre d’Orange, a mephitic bouquet of bodily ooze incorporating sweat, sperm, saliva, blood and breast milk. “It’s a way to rebel, for younger people to become their own person,” Sandamas said. “They want to feel like they’re claiming [a challenging fragrance] and showing it to the world.”

The owner of Bloom Perfumery, Oxana Polyakova, has a theory about the burgeoning fascination for confrontational fragrances. “We are attracted to gore. We can’t help looking. There’s a little bird sitting on a branch – we’re not interested. The bird run over by a car? Yeah, we’ll stop and inspect what’s going on.” Because the perfume market is so oversaturated, it’s the freak show performers that draw customers, she said. “They’re no longer in the forest where they listen to the rustle of the leaves and the birds. They’re like kids on a sugar rush, and they’re only hearing the screams.”

Powering the screams are molecular discoveries. “Each time there’s a development in the aromachemical field, perfumers are encouraged to play with them.” Polyakova cites the smoky-creamy sandalwood in blockbuster Le Labo Santal 33 as a success story, contrasting it with the buzzkill of a cannabis-inspired aromachemical. “Quite a few brands tried it, but it turned out customers don’t want 100ml of aftershave that smells like weed. They’re curious to smell it, but they won’t invest and a lot of brands discontinued those.” The menu of Class-A fragrances contains materials that can evoke crystal meth, magic mushrooms, even cocaine. The last one is a feature of Tom Ford Tuscan Leather, at least according to Canadian rapper Drake in his track named after the scent.

Perfume enthusiast and Moldy Peaches singer-songwriter Adam Green has tapped a different vein of celebrity signature scents. His surreal graphic novel, Adam Green’s Fragrance Adventure, features me in my capacity as a perfume expert in a fictional quest to discover David Bowie’s favourite perfume. Possibly as an antidote to drug-fuelled fumes, Green sees an increasing preponderance of hyper-fresh green notes. “Bitter galbanum seems to be making a comeback as the world becomes more severe – Hermès H24 smells like supernatural green digital shaving foam.” Acknowledging the vegetal nature of Terre d’Hermès’s recent flankers Eau Givrée (“celery gin and tonic with an orange slice”) and Eau de Parfum Intense (“toasted seeds and curried vegetables”), he suggested, “Hermès is intent on making men smell like handsome salads.”

Rather than manipulating molecules or the cravings of adolescents, perfume writer Kashina predicts the rise of temporal manipulation, or what she calls “patient perfumes”. These are “ones that don’t clatter out the gates, but take the full day to reveal themselves on skin,” she told me. “They live with you, speak to you, whisper at night.” Kashina’s slow burners include Epona by Papillon Artisan Perfumes and Rauque by Roberto Greco, both composed around leather, an accord which Coty’s Lienhard says “could shape the next olfactive wave,” after years of dominance by vanilla.

Adam Green has also clocked the beginnings of the leatherverse in his perfume perambulations. “The concept of what leather is continues to expand – something like Elastoplast leather [more pleather than animal hide] is finding its way into all sorts of things,” he said. He’s noticed “futuristic space leather scents,” like Ganymede by Marc-Antoine Barrois with its ozonic vinyl vapour, which “feel like they could be worn on the planet Arrakis”.

So after everything from cannabis (Comme des Garçons Ganja) to candy-floss (Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540), what will be the next blockbuster ingredient? “There hasn’t been a breakthrough with a tropical fruit molecule yet,” said perfume consultant Sandamas . “A really massive mango, a really massive guava, a really massive pineapple. Tropical fruits will be the next big molecules.”

It seems the future of perfume is being steered by chemists as well as teenagers. The original YouTube perfume reviewers of the noughties have given way to TikTok and Instagram reviewers, and thence to the most modern yet olden-days iteration yet, perfume podcasters. Invisible artworks, deliberated by unseen voices, is a perfect match of craft to platform.

Magazine editor and fragrance devotee Dan Rolleri’s favourite podcasters are Tynan Sinks and Sable Yong of Smell Ya Later (“Honest brokers, willing to go negative, swear a lot and appear to be actual human beings,” he told me). A recent episode of Smell Ya Later featured a wide-ranging ramble around the possibilities of artificial intelligence and perfume, with master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel.

Ladamiel is part of Osmo, a machine- learning startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, funded by Google and led by a neuroscientist. Osmo’s goals involve leveraging its proprietary Olfactory Intelligence (OI) technology, chemistry and artistry to create bespoke fragrances and exclusive new molecules. Osmo’s AI-assisted smell sensors have compelling new applications, from diagnosing diseases to authenticating Air Jordans. The company also ballyhoos their ability to digitise the smell of a baby, a solution to a non-existent problem if I’ve ever heard one.

Laudamiel described how AI takes the grunt work out of scent-creation by measuring and calibrating ingredients, optimising effects and enhancing performance. How can AI support creativity in perfume, as opposed to flattening it, as it does with AI-generated writing and music?

“Unlike with writing and music, there is not much trustworthy data available online for the AI to scrape,” Laudamiel explained. “Very few formulas of value are available online and they aren’t weighed to check how they actually smell.” But although AI can’t innovate, it can be used by perfumers as a creative prompt to provide an unusual starting point. It’s like Beat writer William Burroughs’s cut-up method, a Dada-inspired technique of physically cutting up then rearranging written text to make surprising new work. Osmo’s OI platform, Ladamiel said, “cuts the song and dance of deciding what to work on at the start of a project. I still start from scratch as well, or can still do an entire fragrance manually. I choose how I want to tackle a project.”

Saskia Wilson-Brown, the founder of the Institute for Art and Olfaction, a non-profit organisation devoted to experimentation and access in perfumery, is intrigued by the possibilities. “A very likely scenario is that AI will allow for laypeople to create and produce bespoke scents for themselves,” she elaborated, “thereby cutting out the fragrance brands altogether, with the juice itself created by at-home automated perfume production devices.” At the dawning of this are companies like Algorithmic Perfumery, whose mad scientist test-tubes-and-conveyor-belt contraption in the Fragrance Shop’s flagship London store pumps out custom perfumes based on customers’ questionnaire answers.

“I like to think, however, that our future selves will appreciate the human touch as much as we do,” said Wilson-Brown. “The question is just whose touch they prefer.” Would they prefer a scent made by an unknown perfumer at a faceless brand in New Jersey? Or would they prefer a scent made by themselves, with a little AI intervention?

Coty’s Lienhard is sceptical. “The art of perfumery lies in its ability to move, surprise and resonate on a deeply personal level,” he told me, “which is something algorithms, regardless of their advancement, cannot fully replicate.”

In my decades of writing about perfume, the question I’m most asked is a wistful one: “Which fragrance is guaranteed to get me laid?” Whatever the future of scent reveals, this most analogue of needs will always be at its core. The answer, of course, is none of them. Perfume is a spell you cast on yourself, a talisman that makes you more you, with all of the benefits and consequences that entails. The secondary effect may well be a turning of heads from passers-by, but that’s a result of the message you send to yourself every time you apply your scent: “I matter.” Perfume is magic, something occult that connects us to a satisfyingly deeper version of ourselves. For that reason alone, it will always be future-proof.

Photograph Florian Sommet / Trunk Archive