A Nose in the perfume industry is an artist who can create scent experiences that take us through time back to our childhood, to change our mood through the creative blend of the perfect ingredients. Their unsung talents are akin to a Michelin star chef or a fine artist, as their craft is honed over time. Yet, the Nose is not confined to the perfume industry. The scent business encompasses the expected fragrance, personal care, and cosmetic market, but also the home goods, industrial design, air purification, ambient scents, and hospitality.
According to an industry analysis report by Grand View Research, “The global perfume market size was valued at USD 31.4 billion in 2018 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 3.9% from 2019 to 2025.” They cite personal grooming, coupled with increasing demand for luxury and exotic fragrances as the main reason for the growth. The scent business is a big deal with its nose in everything from your detergent to your cosmetics to how the gas smells as it is pumped into your car. If it doesn’t smell pleasing, it will not sell or customers will not return for more. Our own olfactory is a driver of our moods and memory. Smells that trigger a bad one (mood or memory) will override any logic to the contrary.
One of the most upsetting COVID-19 side effects for many people was the loss of taste and smell, sometimes for months, and with some long-haulers, the damage continues today.
The human sense of smell, although less keen than most of the animal kingdom, is the quickest signal that gets to our limbic system. This system in our brain is involved in our behavioral and emotional responses. These are the survival responses we need for feeding, reproduction, caring for our young, and fight-or-flight responses. For instance, when we meet someone for the first time, our olfactory can sense the pheromones that are created by emotions, telling us if that person is safe or dangerous. Without the sense of smell, we can feel unsettled and on high alert.
The art of perfuming uses this olfactory information to craft scents that set the intended mood. Natural gas is scented with a rotten egg smell to alert you to danger. Certain hotel chains have signature scents to create a more lasting memory, hopefully, it is a pleasing one as well. Westin was one of the first hotel chains to have a signature scent of white tea, vanilla, and cedar. Higher-end hotels are hiring olfactory experts to develop scents based on their core customers and the overall experience they are offering. This scent is delivered through the HVAC system throughout the entire building subtlety at an almost imperceptible level. It’s almost subliminal, yet your nose knows.
In the insightful, spiritual industry, scent is a cornerstone. Aromatherapy, candles, oils, sprays, incense, soaps, lotions, as well as perfume, are some of a store’s best sellers and inspire additional income streams from workshops and store-branded items. Each store you walk into seems to have its own signature scent based on the combination of scented products offered there. At Coventry Creations, people ask us for our “factory scent” as a product. We have tried to capture this in a single product, but it never comes close to the 30 years of scent that has permeated all surfaces.
There is a low barrier to entry for blending your own scents, making this an effective way to improve store branding and customer loyalty. It’s effective, but not necessarily easy. Having a large variety of scents and essential oil on hand to create the perfect blend, combined with the other packaging needs of bottles and labels can end up being a large investment over time. Not to mention keeping up with the inventory as it sells down. Yet, it is a point of pride when customers come back for more because your blend is their favorite.
Before you start bottling your own branded oils or take a deep dive into soap-making YouTube instructional videos, take a peek at the coming trends for the scent business and see if you can get in front of what the experts say your customers will be clambering to buy.
2023 Scent Trends
The scent trends for 2023 are looking to bring peace, balance, and ever-deepening permission to explore self-care in new ways.
The Pantone color of the year is digital lavender, pairing well with lavender being the scent of the year, Lavender as a color and a scent is calming, making that a theme for 2023. Lavender as a scent invokes calm, peaceful emotions. It is also known as a loving fragrance that invites warm feelings, kindness, nurturing, and self-love.
This fits right in with the continuing trends of products and fragrances that are focused on personal growth, self-care, spiritual development, and community.
For the 2022/2023 season, Bell Fragrance, a top German fragrance house, created a range of inspirational new fragrances that are focused on the emotional responses of scent. The “Feel-Good Mood” trend brings about happiness and smiles, “Do it Yourself” is designed to help you escape from the stress of everyday life, and “A Need for Nature” which connects the peaceful emotions that being in nature brings, bookends their trends of 2023 “It is all about positive thinking, finding ourselves and becoming one with nature.” Bell creates fragrances for personal care products as well as household care.
Meanwhile, enRoute (en-route.com-au) — an online style guide in Australia, is touting amber, vanilla, cinnamon, saffron, and other earthy fragrances as the 2023 summer fragrance trend. These warmer scents are another group that can help ease frazzled nerves. Their examples are represented in the top luxury perfume brands from Ellis Brooklin’s Sun Fruit at $158 a bottle to Clive Christian’s Blonde Amber at $699 a bottle. That is a lot of luxurious self-care!
Alibaba, the mega importer, is showing that ingredient-driven fragrances are the focus for product development and importers. There is a laser focus on health with customers educating themselves on thesafety and wellness features of the ingredients. They are also showing that their customers are choosingenvironmental sustainability over price. There is a growing demand for eco-friendly and natural perfumes and scented products.
Next-Gen of the Scent Business
Natural scents (not just recreations)
Even in the world of essential oils, the next evolution in the scent business is natural scents — the actual plants, wood, resin, and the gentle odor they release. That is not always practical or achievable but watch for this trend and the creative ways it can be achieved.
Personal scents, in a minimalistic way
Millennials and Gen Z, are looking to personalize their experience. They support individuality and will buy natural single scents to create their own personal signature fragrance. Independent and franchise retailers are popping up around the country to help customers create their own signature scents.
Natural odor removers
For the environment, body, spills, and pet accidents, natural odor removers are a fast-growing market segment. Have you watched the Lume Deodorant commercials? That is taking social media by storm! The old Farmer’sAlmanac has plenty of DIY natural odor control remedies and there are tons of companies using that information to create products for us folks that don’t have time to make our own.
Scents and food
Teas as a multi-sense experience is nothing new, but they have a new marketing message with scent before taste in the experience. Tea Aroma from ScentsofTea.com starts the journey into tea as a multi-sensory experience. Since the sense of smell and taste are connected, this is a natural evolution.
Restaurants have known for years to never use scented candles in their dining rooms, but now some finedining experiences are including an additional focus on the sense of smell in your food experience, above and beyond what you naturally get. Wood cutlery that has its own aroma, for instance, spoons scented with raspberry or bergamot to enhance a plain vanilla ice cream. Another experience is bowls of food placed atop a larger dish of hyacinths. The waiter pours hot water over the flowers at the tableside, releasing their scent immediately prior to customers’ consumption of the dish. Best yet is plates made from burnt oak leaves or charred chestnut wood, where the plate itself is the source of the aromatic experience.
Scents and cocktails
Kevin Peterson and Jane Larson combined their background in perfume, design, and culinary arts to create their unique cocktails at their Detroit-based bar Castalia. Using their own brand of natural perfumes, SfumatoFragrances tapped into a scent’s ability to enhance the flavor of a drink. This unique experience blends the similarities between both the ingredients and impressions created by cocktails and perfumes.
This amazing experience can also be found at Bar du Fouquet’s, Cannes at Le Majestic Hotel in France. Emanuele Balestra, the bar manager deconstructs every aspect of each cocktail to push the boundaries of the sensory drinking experience, adding additional natural fragrances to the bitters, cordials, and tinctures used in the cocktails.
From what is trending to what is evolving, the most impressive development in the scent business are the sniff technologies. These may not create the next perfume trend, but there are artificial noses being developed to detect cancer, viruses such as COVID-19, potential food allergies in prepared food, and explosives.
Trend predictions are fun to research and it’s exciting to watch what actually unfolds. Let’s see how the business of scent evolves! On a final (olfactory) note — they have been threatening smell-o-vision since the ‘60s but it looks like someone is actually figuring out a way to make it a reality!
