I'm that guy who likes to smell good.
Apparently that's become more complicated than it used to be.
This isn't one of my careful pieces. I take a few swings at fragrance culture here, but I'm immersed in it too, so consider it one man ribbing his own hobby. It's fragrance, for God's sake.
Here's the situation.
I enjoy wearing fragrances, I'm a heavy user. I wear one every day, sometimes two or three different ones depending on how many times I shower. I don't wait for an occasion. If I'm awake, I've got something on.
And, true to form…. I love the expensive stuff.
Baccarat Rouge 540 Extrait. Absolu Aventus. Bal d'Afrique Absolu. Real bottles. Real money. $300 to $500 a pop. I don't overspray. But at that rate, I was going through those bottles faster than...
I won't type faster than what. That's not willpower.
Now, this is how I was raised:
Wearing a fragrance that owned the room was considered bad form. The kind that announced your arrival three hours before you arrived and lingered like a bad one-night stand that won't leave in the morning.
I still believe it and follow one simple rule.
If someone can smell my fragrance before they're standing directly in front of me, I've put too much on. I wear fragrance for me, applied like I've got some sense, not to carpet-bomb a restaurant. That was the etiquette I came up on, and somewhere along the way it changed. So did the floor plan.
I spent forty years in luxury retail, so I notice things.
Like the fact that department stores have quietly moved fragrance to the front of the store and pushed many of the traditional cosmetics houses farther back. That real estate you see when you first walk into a store is some of the most valuable land in the building. Beauty brands fought for decades over who controlled it.
Fragrance has increasingly taken it over.
Truth be told, many of those fragrances are owned by the very same companies whose cosmetics counters got moved farther back. And, while I wasn't paying attention, an entire hierarchy also sprang up without consulting me. In case you weren't aware, and I certainly wasn't, there's now something resembling a fragrance caste system that the YouTube and TikTok frag boys can spend days arguing about.
Ultra niche. Luxury niche. Niche. Niche adjacent.Designer. Masstige.
And my own contribution to the hierarchy: drugstore.
Because there are some really good fragrances hiding on aisle two between the deodorant and toothpaste, and I'm not leaving them out simply because nobody put them behind a glass counter. Honestly, does any of this really matter?
Do I like the fragrance?
Does it work on my skin? That's about all I need to know. Which brings me to the part that actually fascinates me.
Middle Eastern fragrance.
It's become a multibillion-dollar business, but much of its international growth has happened outside the traditional Western department-store model I spent forty years working in. Amouage is one of the exceptions. You'll find it in Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman and Harrods, as well as its own boutiques. But many of the other houses I started discovering: Lattafa, Armaf, Afnan, Paris Corner reached consumers like me another way.
Amazon. Independent beauty stores. Their own websites.
And perhaps most importantly, YouTube and TikTok.
No enormous Western department-store footprint. No army of beauty advisors standing behind polished counters. No multimillion-dollar celebrity staring moodily into the middle distance.
Just the frag boys.
And those guys move merchandise.
Lattafa a fragrance house I couldn't have named when I started this little adventure became the number-one fragrance brand on Amazon in the United States during 2025, capturing 13.9 percent of category sales in the second quarter.
Ahead of Versace.
Let that sit for a second. The guys everybody likes to make fun of weren't just making videos. They were building brands. I think it's a brilliant business model. You can seed a heck of a lot of influencers for what Johnny Depp gets paid to wander around the desert.
And it appears I'm one of their customers.
Because when the bottles I loved started emptying faster than my sense of proportion, I got curious. If I love the DNA of a fragrance, could I find something that gets me 90 percent of the way there that I could wear around the house, to the gym or on a Target run without spraying several dollars into the atmosphere every time I leave the bathroom?
Turns out I could. Sometimes for $30. And every so often something happened that I didn't see coming.
On my skin, I liked the $30 one better than the OG.
That doesn't mean I've broken up with the original.
I still own it. I still love it. The fragrance police have not yet kicked down my door. And when I'm considering something expensive and I'm not sure?
I buy a decant.
Three millilitres. Five millilitres. Enough to actually live with the fragrance instead of spraying it twice at a counter and convincing myself we've formed a meaningful relationship.
Apparently I've reached an age where spending $15 before blindly spending $300 qualifies as personal growth.
I'll take it.
I've put together a Fragrance Resource Guide with the decant sites and full-bottle retailers I actually use, plus a few tricks I've learned for paying less. Every retailer is linked directly, because I don't believe in gatekeeping, or making you work to find something I've told you about. You can download it here.
No affiliate links. I don't make a dime from any of them.
Now, back to my questionable fragrance habits.
And somewhere during all of this, I realised something.
I can hold two conflicting ideas at the same time and lose absolutely no sleep over it.
Apparently I'm supposed to pick a side. I haven't. I'll wear a $15 Target T-shirt with $125 ASRV gym shorts and not think twice.I'll wear a $100 Pagani Design Royal Oak homage one day and a vintage Cartier Tank or a $20,000 Tiffany gold watch the next.
I'll wear Creed Absolu Aventus and I'll wear the $28 L'Aventure inspired by it.
Sometimes I prefer the $28 fragrance on my skin.
So what?
It's never been about the price tag. It's about the personal pleasure I get from the thing. Full stop.
Which is why there's one part of modern fragrance culture I still can't quite get my head around.
The compliment magnet.
Evidently, this is now a legitimate reason to buy a fragrance.
Really?
You buy something as personal as fragrance based on how many strangers might tell you they like it? I buy fragrance because I like the way it smells on me. If someone else likes it, even better. If nobody mentions it all day, I'm not going home questioning my worth as a man. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. I'm comfortable with that too.
And now for the part where I undermine several paragraphs of my own essay.
Armani may have just beaten the Middle Eastern houses at their own game.
They got samples of their new fragrance, I WILL, into the hands of a lot of YouTube and TikTok fragrance influencers in advance of the launch.
One of the guys I watch got one. I watched his review. And I thought it was fair. So, what did the man who has just spent several paragraphs taking the piss out of fragrance influencers do? I went to Sephora that same day.
Of course I did.
I sprayed I WILL on my skin. And darn, I liked it. Not immediately in a stop everything, we've discovered fire sort of way. It was simply a really nice fragrance. Then I went about my day.
And it dried down beautifully on my skin.
Hours later, I could still smell it. Then that evening my mother who almost never comments on what I'm wearing, except when I wear Aventus, asked me what I had on.
Well, that sealed the deal.Tomorrow I'm going back to buy the bottle.
Do I need another fragrance? Absolutely not. But it smells really good on me.
And remember where we started.
I'm just a guy who likes to smell good.
As I see it, the nose must travel.
Let's see how long it takes Lattafa or Armaf to come out with a $30 dupe.
I'll start the clock.
Until next time,
