So Eau'ver It - Can Popularity Ruin A Perfume's Appeal?

I have a confession to make: I am a Maison Francis Kurkdijan Baccarat Rouge 540 devotee – but I kind of hate myself for it. I love how it smells, I love how it makes me feel when I wear it and I love when people comment on it. But the thing is, it’s a perfume that can be considered one of the greatest – and most popular – of our time. And although that’s for a very good reason, it’s also the very thing that makes me question my own choices.

I judge myself for wanting to douse myself in something that’s so well known and so recognisable because, for a long time, I’ve worn scents that are a bit more off the beaten track. While everybody was going crazy for Escentric Molecules 01, I was wearing The Beautiful Mind Series Volume 1: Intelligence & Fantasy, both, incidentally, created by the same perfumer, Geza Schoen. Then, while Le Labo’s Santal 33 was having its moment, the brand’s lesser known Another 13 became my signature. As soon as I noticed that gaining in perfume popularity, I quietly moved onto Thé Matcha 26.

Call it scent snobbery, but I know it’s not just me who feels this way about wearing the same perfume as other people. A quick poll on my Instagram led to hundreds of replies from people who’ve sought out new fragrances after their beloved go-to gradually became more well known or fell foul of copycatting. ‘Jo Malone London’s Velvet Rose and Oud was my wedding scent. My best friends bought it for me and had the lid engraved with my new initials – but now I don’t wear it because Aldi does a more affordable dupe so it's lost its specialness,’ read one reply. ‘I love wearing Coco Chanel, my mum and grandma wore it too, so it was almost like a family secret because everybody else wore Chanel No.5, but a few years ago it started getting more popular and it made me uncontrollably rage,’ read another response.

But what is it about retaining ownership of a scent that makes us indignant when it’s absorbed into the zeitgeist? As Nick Gilbert, perfume expert and founder of fragrance consultancy Olfiction says, ‘It’s overwhelmingly true that over exposure leads to boredom and indifference towards anything. This holds true for fragrance as much as it does food, music or clothing.’ In short, when we smell our pleasingly niche perfume spritzed on every other person in Soho, our noses get the ick.

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Scientifically speaking, though, it’s because our sense of smell is incredibly powerful and shouldn’t be underestimated. ‘Not only is smell the only sense that’s fully developed and able to work properly while a foetus is still within the womb, but all other sensory information received into the brain comes from the relevant receptor (eyes, skin, etc) via the thalamus, but smell bypasses that. That means it’s processed more quickly and goes straight to the limbic system – home to the key areas of the brain involved in processing emotions and memories,’ explains neuromarketing specialist Katie Hart.

Psychotherapist Roxy Rhodes agrees, adding that because smell triggers our emotional brain, it can transport us back to a time, place or person linked to it. ‘However, this pathway can be erased with repeated smelling, so the link to the memory becomes overridden and weakened – as a result, smelling something regularly easily dilutes it and literally changes its meaning,’ she says. When we deliberately seek out lesser known fragrances with the idea that very few people will also be wearing them, those scent memories remain in focus instead of becoming blurred.

‘But when a scent becomes ubiquitous, some of that draw is lost,’ explains Gilbert. ‘It’s not all negative though, and it’s important to remember that a fragrance doesn’t suddenly become “bad” just because everybody is wearing it. Years ago I exclusively wore Dior Homme for a while, and I would notice other people wearing it too. I loved the fragrance, and so it was always nice to smell it on other people,’ he says.

Perhaps it’s all a matter of perfume perspective. Another reply to my Instagram poll was equally as optimistic: ‘Santal 33 and Baccarat Rouge are my all time favourite scents. I love how they’re so noticeable and quite strong, so when you smell them on people, on the bus or in a shop, it’s such a familiar feeling. It’s like being in a little club.’ And that couldn’t be more true – as good as it is to smell different, it can often be just as nice to know you’re not alone. Plus, as Gilbert says: ‘It’s much less mortifying to have the same fragrance as another person than when you turn up to an event in the same outfit, especially because we all wear fragrance differently owing to our “skin chemistry”, personal style, and so on.’

For me, I know I was late to the Baccarat Rouge party so I have no choice but to be on board with the overexposure of it – I’m contributing to it as well, after all – and while that might make it simultaneously more and less appealing, my relationship with Another 13 is a different story altogether. Although I might not wear it half as often as I once did, I now feel a sense of pride when I smell it on other people. It brings back memories of the time in my life when I did wear it – and that’s the great thing about perfume, it has an unrivalled ability to transport you to a happy place in an instant. Even when a fragrance might not be quite as impressively unique to me as I’d like, the memories associated with it always will be.