They smelt the future – and took it online

The indie director: Scout Dixon West

There’s a cinematic moodiness to Scout Dixon West’s Instagram feed that makes sense on discovering she’s a scriptwriter and a former model, one who can still work the camera with a smoulder that matches her eponymous perfume brand.

Growing up in northern California, Dixon West, 28, started out as a “girl perfume” enthusiast – “Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, that kind of fragrance” – but became more intentional about her hobby as she grew older. “I learned that it could be a really useful tool for self-expression and transportation. You can slip into a daydream very easily via smells. Your moods can be accentuated by them. You can use them as a form of armour.” Working part-time at the store Scent Bar in Los Angeles accelerated her obsession; in 2023, she set up her brand. 

On TikTok, where she has 144,300 followers, Dixon West can be found chatting knowledgably about new and old fragrances. The focus for her own brand is vintage-inspired scents, with three launched so far: Coney Island Baby, El Dorado and Incarnate. “It’s popular now for perfumes to be quite unisex in a bloodless, sterile, says-nothing way. We wanted to do things a little differently,” she says. She comes up with the concepts, then commissions a fragrance house in Europe to blend them – with unusual results. Coney Island Baby squares up to the sugary gourmand fragrances that have been popular with young female consumers. “It has this motor-oily, smoggy smell, almost like asphalt on a hot day, but then underneath it is a very comfortable kind of vanilla soft-serve waffle cone,” says Dixon West. “I was thinking of a lot of films – The Outsiders, The Last Picture Show, Stand by Me. Even Grease.” 

The TikTok smellmaxxer: Jatin Arora

Last year Jatin Arora turned 18 and reached an audience of two million followers on TikTok. He also graduated from high school with no plans to go to college. “Even if I studied for five, 10 years and then got a job, I wouldn’t be making as much money as I’m making doing this,” he says, with a grin. And while he won’t spill on salary, his opinions on perfume have earned him a house in his hometown of Winnipeg, Canada, facilitated a search for a property in Dubai, and allowed his mother to retire. This, after posting his first-ever perfume video only in June 2023.

Arora started out performing magic tricks on TikTok to an audience of 800,000. When he began tracking his adventures in perfume as TheCologneBoy – his first video showed him unboxing Versace Eros, Versace Dylan Blue and Dior Sauvage purchased from Costco – his followers were more than happy to migrate. His appeal has coincided with the rise of Gen Z’s “fragheads” and “smellmaxxers”, a new audience of young perfume fanatics who love to hear reviews of the juice and the bottle, seek guidance on the scents that attract the opposite sex and find out about the best dupes (cheap fragrances that smell the same as luxury perfumes).

Eighty per cent of Arora’s audience is male and aged between 16 and 26, an overlooked demographic. “No one my age ever bought [fragrance] before and now they’re going into stores and smelling perfume because they get it,” Arora says. “And they like the compliments they receive when they wear it.” 

The old-school Substacker: Luca Turin

“Anyone can make the first five minutes of a fragrance, but the next three hours? Tricky.” So says Luca Turin, half-Italian, half-Argentinian, Beirut-born 71-year-old biophysicist and writer, research professor at the University of Buckingham – and a legend among perfume lovers. Revered for his theories on the mechanisms of human smell and his devastating critiques of fragrances, he began writing about perfume in 1992 and has since authored six books, including two bestselling guides with his wife, Tania Sanchez. 

Last year, after a hiatus caused by his low opinion of the contemporary mainstream perfume market, he returned to reviewing, publishing a newsletter, “Luca Turin on perfume etc”, on Substack. “I was born at the wrong time because I saw the old world end,” says Turin. “People who never smelled the Guerlain fragrances as they were don’t feel bad about the way perfume is now.” Nevertheless: “There’s been a huge rise in niche and artisan perfumery and I felt these guys needed an airing. There’s a return to texture, to quality materials. It’s like the way audiophiles listen to music – no comparison to listening in a car or on tinny speakers. The equivalent in perfumery is appreciating really great material, quite apart from the actual composition, which also needs to be good.”

His take on perfume layering? ‘You don’t play two pieces of music at once’

Turin doesn’t think all mainstream fragrance is bad – he rates Les Heures de Parfum XI L’Heure Perdue by Mathilde Laurent at Cartier (pictured left, £245 for 75ml) as “one of the great masterpieces” of the past 20 years. He does sniff at rising prices, especially for artisanal perfumes: “£200 a bottle is a tall order.” Nevertheless, he concedes, there are niche perfumes that are “outstandingly wonderful”. Ruade by Marc-Antoine Corticchiato of Parfum D’Empire (2023) is a case in point: “When you first put it on, you think, ‘I can’t wear this, I smell like a barnyard.’ But 10 minutes later, it morphs into this celestial light.”

To hear or read Turin on perfume is to inhale some refreshing opinions: “Things don’t have to smell expensive to smell good, the original Brut and Old Spice were terrific.” His take on layering? “You don’t play two pieces of music at once.” Agree or disagree, Turin’s a classic and his reissue (original formula, new distributor) is welcome.

The YouTube fraghead: Olivia VanDerMillen

A fruity fragrance for summer? How to smell like old money? Olivia VanDerMillen’s knowledge of what’s what in the perfume market right now provides answers to the fragrance questions you didn’t know you needed to ask. “I want to be a Rolodex of fragrance information,” she says. “I’m trying to help people find what feels like home for them, no matter the price point, no matter their education surrounding fragrances.”

VanDerMillen’s gregarious on-camera persona, which encompasses her distinctive tattoos, punchy hairstyles and rapid-fire delivery, belies a thoughtful off-screen nature. She used to work as a hairdresser in a Los Angeles salon but has since moved to Austin and taken on social media full-time – she seems surprised by her online popularity. She “accidentally” entered the influencer space in 2021 when she started “yapping” on YouTube about perfumes during the pandemic “just to feel something”. When she started making short-form videos on Instagram and TikTok, comparing high-end and affordable fragrances, things took off. 

Her goal is to end the snobbery that divides affordable, indie and luxury perfumes

Growing up in a working-class town in Iowa, VanDerMillen often felt perfume was out of reach. “Fine perfumery has been inaccessible to so many, not only price-wise but also as an intimidating world of artistry… ‘I don’t know if I’m fancy enough to wear it’,” she says. Her goal now is to end the snobbery that divides affordable, indie and luxury perfumes. “Why is there a divide?” she asks. “Why can’t we just enjoy all of it?”

While VanDerMillen’s ability to communicate about fragrance has helped her to reach audiences she would never have dreamed of, she has further olfactory goals. “My sense of smell is good, but I meet these master perfumers, and I see how brilliant their noses are. I just hope to be able to get to that level at some point.” 

The artisan perfumer: Maya Njie

Open Maya Njie’s Discovery Set, an introduction to her small range of perfumes handcrafted in batches in the perfumer’s London studio, and out fall snapshots from an old family album showing Sweden and Gambia in the 1970s. For Njie, 44, who was born in Sweden and moved to London in her late teens, reconstructing these family “memories” in scent lies at the heart of her brand. “I’ve always associated people and places with smells. When I smell something, I think of colours and shapes and musical notes.”

After studying surface design as a mature student, Njie began blending her own perfumes and scenting the reception at the co-working space where she was front-of-house. “When someone asked if they could buy my perfume, I had to start finding out about fragrance in a commercial sense – bottles, cosmetic legislation, packaging.”

Now Njie blends her fragrances and leads bespoke perfume-making workshops at her studio in Shoreditch. The brand’s seven perfumes, all inspired by photographs, include the foresty Nordic Cedar, the bright, white and gently woody Les Fleurs, and the leathery Voyeur Verde (an image of an abandoned two-tone Mercedes-Benz baking in undergrowth was the starting point). Six of them are stocked in Liberty, and they are available in America, although the biggest customer base is Japan. Njie says that growth is due to perfume lovers enjoying the sense of discovery that artisanal brands provide. “Wearers aren’t so caught up on the big labels any more,” she says. “They find an artisan who makes something that they really love and they become loyal to that.”