The brick-and-mortar fragrance business is booming

Posted by Robin on 25 October 2025 4 Comments

While sniffing via a screen is a technology yet to be cracked, the brick-and-mortar fragrance business is booming: 75 percent of fragrance sales in the U.S. happen in stores. And over the past year, it’s seemed as if every other boutique opening in the city is a perfumer or a home-fragrance shop. [...] Naked Ghosts (66 Greenwich Ave.), which opened in the summer, offers a tight selection of niche eaux (such as Annindriya and Chester Gibs’s Walk With Me) chosen by store co-founder Christophe Laudamiel, a perfumer whose own fragrances are for sale.

— Read more in What’s That Smell? 11 New Fragrance Stores Open in New York magazine.

New scent molecules

Posted by Robin on 30 August 2023 Leave a Comment

"I am thrilled to be joining the Osmo team building the world's first AI platform for scent molecule discovery," said Laudamiel. "The fragrance industry has mastered complex plant extractions, scent chemistries, and manufacturing at scale. But when it comes to discovering new scent molecules , there is a new opportunity to explore the billions of untapped molecules that human noses cannot screen on their own."

Would they sell music or a poem with no singer, songwriter, or poet’s name on it?

Posted by Robin on 27 June 2022 9 Comments

End gross practice #1 from fashion and music brands at literally no cost: demand that perfumer(s)’ names are on the bottle. Would they sell music or a poem with no singer, songwriter, or poet’s name on it? Do they hide the name of the fashion designer? When they do, you know the quality and the creativity of the fashion. Perfumery is no exception.

— Read more in Part 1: Christophe Laudamiel's Dear World Manifesto at BeautyMatter.

Summer greens ~ fragrance reviews

Posted by Jessica on 19 May 2022 6 Comments

Longtime readers here at Now Smell This will be familiar with the idea of the purgatory basket. It doesn’t have to be a basket, strictly speaking: it could also be a bowl or box or drawer, any container that holds an assortment of samples we try, think about, and decide to reassess later. The delay might just be a matter of mood or season or, in my case, a busy calendar that distracts me from my usual sampling efforts.

I recently revisited four releases from 2021 (and one older fragrance) and realized that they all had some kind of “green” theme in common — gardens, vines, mosses. In addition to my usual rotation of L’Ombre dans l’eau and tart rhubarb-y scents, I might be branching out (hah) a bit this summer.

To start: I recently read Muriel Barbery’s A Single Rose, and its descriptions of Kyoto’s Zen gardens sent me hunting for the vial of Le Jardin Retrouvé Mousse Arashiyama (image below) that I’d stashed away for later reappraisal…

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Two questions

Posted by Robin on 23 March 2022 2 Comments

...she told me that in the spring of 2002, they had people from Abercrombie stand outside of a New York City club at 3 a.m. so they could ask two questions. They asked guys: “Which of these scents would you wear if you were trying to get laid?” And they asked girls: “Which fragrance would you prefer your lover to wear as you’re having sex?”

— Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel on the selection process for Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce. Read more in I’m the perfumer who created the scent you love to hate — Abercrombie & Fitch’s Fierce at MEL Magazine. (And it really is worth a read, especially if you've never really investigated how the perfume industry works.)

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