Proust, but baby

Why Gen Alpha is Obsessed With Perfume

Last August, I attended Sleeping Beauties: Fashion Reawakened, or, the exhibition all those celebrities are dressing in theme to for The Met Gala. Designed as a long walk through serpentine white corridors lathed in the same type of light more often experienced on a surgical table, Sleeping Beauties had an oddly sterile feel. The Met catalogue explains that its combination of archivally displayed garments alongside a scratch-and-sniff wall and various holograms is intended to “reanimate these objects, helping us experience them as they were originally intended — with vibrancy, dynamism, and life.” Reviewers of this exhibit have largely panned this approach as gimmicky. Times critic Vanessa Freidman explains,

I think it’s because, with the feel-me walls, the bend-’n-sniff tubes, the claymation-like animated embroideries, it seemed like a grown-up version of the children’s ‘discovery’ gallery, but with much chicer clothes.

While I agree the execution was lacking, I found the idea of “reanimating” history via collections of molecules museum guests could sniff in order to smell different eras fascinating.

Garbage molecule description at The Met, 2024.

“Nothing revives the past so completely as the smell that was associated with it,” Vladimir Nabokov writes in his memoir, Speak, Memory. While Nabokov’s theory is both philosophically sound and scientifically true, it seems unlikely that the olfactory connection to experience is quite as profound if we, in fact, have no memory of the experience to begin with.

Personally, I am a life long enthusiast for scratch-and-sniff technology. As a child, I believed televisions would soon be outfitted with a scratch-and-sniff panel that would allow me to smell what Monica was cooking on Friends. Now I am an adult who alleviates their disappointed that this technology has not materialized with clandestine sniffs of the grape marker in the supply closet at work. So, you can imagine that I was especially disappointed that The Met’s scratch-and-sniff wall was pretty much…wall scented. (

Emilia Petrarca

over at Shop Rat had a similar experience, detailed in her interesting review of the exhibit.)

“Can you smell anything?” chic middle-aged women whispered to one another. As we crouched and stood on tiptoe in an attempt to find a panel that had not been scratched into oblivion, it occurred to me that we might, every single one of us, have COVID. After a split second of panic, I lifted my wrist to my nose to make sure I could still smell Tom Ford Black Orchid — I could, thank god.

Of the many things that chill me about the pandemic, the one I think about the most is how COVID’s common symptom — loss of smell — will impact our cultural memory of one of the most intense communal catastrophes of our lives. Absent the sense most associated with remembering, how will this time, to use Nabokov’s word, be “revived”? Of course we did not all have COVID at the same time or even in the same way.

Tubes filled, allegedly, with molecules.

While not everyone infected experiences anosmia, a Yale study shows over 60% of people lost their ability to smell during COVID. Enough people that I’ve remained fixated on the idea that, as a community, we will not be able to remember this era in the same way we have remembered any other era not just in our lives, but in our larger history. The portal to the past provided by olfactory memory is simply not be present for some of us. Perhaps more troublesome, our ability to reach consensus on what this time in our lives smelled like might never align. As Dawn Goldworm, nose of the “olfactive branding company” 12.29, explains to the Harvard Gazette “smell and emotion are stored as one memory.”

So, if we didn’t smell the same thing, did we feel the same thing?

I don’t have an answer to that, but it’s impossible for me not to wonder if the recent boom in perfume amongst Gen Alpha has something to do with this search for shared experience. Fragrance is the fastest growing category in the prestige beauty sector, up 12% over the last year — a continued increase since the initial 2021 stay-at-home fragrance spike. More surprising, Pop Sugar reports that over half of fragrance purchases are made by Gen Alpha. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has visited a Sephora bombarded by fourteen-year-olds swarming the Sol de Janeiro body sprays. If you can manage to make your way through that crowd, it’s pretty common that whatever fragrance you’re there to smell is empty anyway.

Glossier (always genius in their ability to get customers to spend money on products the industry has traditionally considered unsellable via online retail, a fact I hadn’t really appreciated until

Annie Kreighbaum

discussed it on a recent episode of her podcast Eyewitness Beauty) has capitalized on this trend with their recent launch of You flankers, Rêve and Doux.

An image of Rêve in Vogue leaked before the launch, later removed!!

These scents were hyped by the company via locked mailers sent to influencers whose combinations wouldn’t be sent until the launch, which happened via TikTok earlier this month. And for potential customers not on social media, Glossier covered their bases by spending enough ad dollars to ensure that literally any search for anything related to perfume over the last month would result in Rêve and Doux as your top hit (in my algorithm anyway).

And yet — it is very difficult indeed to smell either of these fragrances in store! I’ve yet to enter a Sephora that actually has them. The friend I attended Sleeping Beauties with (hi,

Rachel Milligan

!) managed to sample them at a store in Philadelphia, but only after asking an employee to unlock them from a case. The end result of Glossier’s hard-to-get strategy? I immediately bought a tube of Balm Dot Com when Glossier emailed to let me know they had samples of Rêve and Doux with purchase. I cannot believe I spent $20 on lip balm I didn’t need just to get samples for flankers of a perfume I don’t even wear, but I sure did!

Like Gen Alpha and Gen Z, I’m also spending an awful lot of time watching people spray themselves with scents on TikTok. Jeremy Fragrance, sure, but my favorite influencers are people who want to tell you their scent for every occasion. Like these influencers, I also have day and night scents as well as date scents, work scents, seasonal scents, and sleep scents. I vacillate between feeling like this is a wildly wasteful, opulently consumerist habit and feeling like it’s one of the rare things I do that truly isn’t for anyone but me. Like Guy de Maupassant eating lunch in the Eiffel tower café everyday because it was the one place in Paris where he didn’t have to look at the structure he regarded as an architectural eyesore, I love perfume because it’s the rare facet of beauty culture that is arguably unfettered by institutionalized beauty standards. Perfume doesn’t show up in the mirror, thus freeing it from the always complicated capitalist gaze.

Obviously, perfume is a marker of wealth, status, privilege — but if you spritz yourself with an indie fragrance made by a reclusive desert witch out in Marfa and no one is around to smell it, are you really a class conformist? Or are you just a person elevating the experience of being alive with accords of leather, animal, and smoked orchid?

It strikes me that perfume marketing’s transition from elitist, often surreal ads featuring conventionally beautiful celebrities to much more accessible influencers peddling fragrance from a blurred background in their apartments adds to Gen Alpha’s sense that fragrance is slightly outside of traditional toxic modes of consumption. This seems echoed by marketing strategies that don’t attempt to associate fragrance with elitism, but with experience.

Paul on TikTok v Brad in Vogue

Replica by Maison Margelia comes to mind as the most prominent example of this practice of emphasizing the experiential aspects of scent with their “memory in a fragrance” branding. If you’re on FragranceTok, you’ve seen By The Fireplace touted as the scent of autumn 2024. Like every Replica perfume, By The Fireplace lists a provenance and period (Chamonix, 1971) prominently on the bottle’s label.

My favorite of their scents? In the Garden (Puglia, 1998). I was fifteen in 1998 and certainly not in Italy, so while I’m not actually having a “memory” of anything, I was creating one as I wore this fragrance throughout summer 2024, Iowa. I like the idea that this memory is palimpsested; that there’s a connection through time and space to somewhere I’ve never been, but could be.

Nostalgia for Dublin, 1967.

Ultimately, that’s what I think Gen Alpha’s obsession with fragrance is about. It’s so boring to note that this generation spends a lot of time with screens or that they lost part of their formative social years during the pandemic, but it’s true. The result is a nostalgia for a past they’ve never experienced.

What I’m saying is: the taste of the madeleine means nothing to them except that one day, it will be how they remember, well, now. These are people actively cultivating their own originary moment; they are Proust, but baby.

This week’s camp rec is: perfume edition! First, a high-end