Against Virality

The case for more personal forms of discovery.

At the second edition of The Pop-up Perfumery, one of the most gratifying things to witness was the sheer range of fragrances being discovered and purchased outside the pressure of social media trends. People came in asking for what they wanted without that desire already being shaped by conformity. They arrived with curious noses and, in most cases, a clear sense of what they were looking for. Being able to connect them with fragrances that genuinely matched those instincts was enormously satisfying.

I want to see more fragrance lovers choosing perfumes for their own skin according to what they truly want, not what they have been taught to desire. I recognise that, as a boutique that primarily operates online for now, Sainte Cellier inevitably benefits from these currents. Even so, I will always advocate against monoculture in the perfume space.

Naming and interrogating the cultures that shape perfumery is hopeful work. Criticism is, for me, the ultimate form of optimism. It does not bother to speak unless it believes something better is possible. It assumes culture can deepen, that taste can sharpen, and that people can be met by more than the easiest available thing. It refuses resignation, and, in this case, insists instead on the possibility of more personal, more satisfying encounters. For fragrance to hold an important place in one’s life, that place should be self-authored. Your skin exists outside the inverted reality of the online world. Perfume it accordingly.

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Online, perfume is increasingly mediated by visibility. People learn what to want by seeing the same bottles repeated, the same references performed, the same purchases used as proof of taste. Virality rewards legibility, not subtlety, so what circulates most easily is not always what is most interesting, but what is most immediately recognisable. The result is a creeping monoculture in which taste is less often discovered than rehearsed.

Yet perfume resists this flattening. Scent is intimate, unstable and stubbornly personal. At the pop-up, away from algorithmic influence, visitors responded not to what they had been told to want, but to what actually resonated. This is what virality interrupts: the slower, more attentive process by which taste is formed through listening, comparison, surprise and genuine fit, rather than repetition and social proof. When that pressure falls away, perfume can return to something more private and more precise. It is no longer a badge of belonging, but a form of recognition.

What online fragrance culture often presents as taste is, in fact, frequently performance: a way of signalling discernment through acquisition, references and the display of correct desire. But perfume is a poor medium for that kind of performance, because its deepest meanings are private. It lives on skin, in memory, in association, in the strange moment of recognition when something feels uncannily one’s own. To collapse scent into virality is to mistake visibility for intimacy. The answer is not to intensify the noise, but to protect the possibility of a more personal encounter.

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Smell

In a culture governed by visibility, those who attract attention are easily mistaken for authorities, and repetition begins to stand in for expertise. This is especially potent in perfume, where scent itself cannot be transmitted online and audiences are therefore unusually reliant on translators, reviewers, content creators and visible enthusiasts to mediate what they think is worth wanting. That gives viral figures a disproportionate power to shape attention, establish hierarchies, and narrow the field of what gets taken seriously.

Perfumery needs criticism, context, history and discernment. The problem arises when authority is conferred by reach rather than depth, and by performance rather than understanding. A new and more opaque form of gatekeeping emerges, in which taste is no longer shaped by meaningful discourse. Part of the problem is affective as well as structural.

Jan Miense Molenaer, The Five Senses: Smell

Perfume culture often rewards not only knowledge, but the performance of paternal authority: the commanding male voice, the dismissive verdict, the ingredient reference used less to illuminate than to establish rank. There is, bluntly, a daddy-issues dimension to this, in which certainty itself becomes seductive and people surrender their own judgement to the figure who seems most commanding. The risk is not only bad recommendations. It can distort what gets stocked, talked about, purchased, imitated and even created, while remaining largely unaccountable for the pressures it produces.

This helps explain the rise of gourmand as the dominant aesthetic shorthand of online perfume culture. Gourmand was not created by social media, but social media has provided the perfect conditions for its acceleration. In short-form spaces, where attention is brief and language must be instantly legible, vanilla means something in a way that abstraction often cannot. Sweetness, creaminess, fruit, sugar, dessert: these are easy to picture, easy to desire, and easy to repeat. What emerges is not simply a trend, but a compression of perfume discourse itself, in which the most transmissible idea begins to crowd out more difficult forms of pleasure.

To resist this compression is to return to curiosity, and to seek personal satisfaction rather than external validation. It also requires spaces shaped by discernment rather than reach, where critics, retailers, and other intermediaries widen the field of what can be encountered rather than simply amplifying what is already visible. It is to remain open to pleasures that do not arrive pre-affirmed, and which require time, ambiguity, and sensitivity before they can become one’s own.

Cover Image: Michaelina Wautier, Smell