Perfume lovers are trading solitary spritz sessions for group smelling events, and the results are forming real friendships, sharper noses, and a movement that’s rewriting what it means to be part of a beauty community.
Perfume clubs — monthly or recurring gatherings where enthusiasts bring bottles to share, pass around blotters, debate notes, and hear from guest perfumers — are springing up with remarkable speed. Dazed reported that communities have formed in London, Berlin, New York, Wroclaw, Helsinki, and Newcastle, and that number keeps climbing. Some are informal blind-smelling sessions run out of someone’s living room. Others are full-fledged ticketed events with guest perfumers, nose-training workshops, and bottle swaps. All of them are built on a premise that sounds almost too simple: get a group of people in a room, pass around something that smells interesting, and see what happens.
What happens, it turns out, is a lot.
From solitary obsession to group ritual
The DNA of the fragrance club isn’t entirely new. Sniffapalooza, founded in 2004 by Karen Dubin and Karen Adams, has been gathering scent devotees in New York City for over two decades. Its signature events — the Spring Fling and Fall Ball — take attendees through a curated tour of Manhattan’s best fragrance boutiques, punctuated by a multi-course lunch where indie and niche perfumers present their latest work and ply the crowd with samples. The swag bags are, by all accounts, legendary. It’s the kind of event that draws people in from out of state, and where a dedicated audience of fragrance fans regularly gets first access to new launches before the general public.
What’s changed recently is the scale and the spirit. Where Sniffapalooza built its reputation around access — getting enthusiasts into rooms with industry professionals and brand founders — the newer wave of clubs is oriented around something more intimate and less transactional. New York Nose launched what it describes as New York City’s first multi-sensory perfume and tea tour, blending fragrance, flavor, and storytelling into a 3.5-hour experience. It now operates as an olfactory travel club, offering curated walking tours, fragrance day trips, and monthly events, with intimate group sizes of four to seven people.
Then there’s ScentXplore, which describes itself as the world’s pioneering hybrid international niche fragrance convention. Its 2025 edition ran December 4 to 6 at Center415 in New York and drew some 5,000 attendees, featuring masterclasses, workshops, one-on-one time with perfumers, and dedicated business-to-business networking spaces. It is less a club than a fragrance universe — proof that, for a certain type of nose, this scene has grown well beyond a casual hobby.
Why smell, and why now
Arabelle Sicardi, olfactive expert and author of The House of Beauty, launched Perfumed Pages, their experimental creative container, for reasons that felt deeply personal. “I was feeling lonely as a writer and fragrance fan, and wanted to cultivate a community experience of the stories that beauty told me were possible,” they explained to Dazed. “I wanted to share the ethos of [The House of Beauty] in a way that made sense; I think the best versions of beauty culture involve experiencing it with other people. So I made that happen intentionally.” Sicardi designed the club to be hybrid — offering both in-person and online events — in order to ensure that “people who are very Covid-conscious or disabled [are] able to participate meaningfully in beauty culture, too.”
Olle Eriksson, the founder of Lisbon Perfume Club, started his club for similar reasons, though he frames it in terms of what he’d grown tired of. “I’ve been here for four years and though I have lots of acquaintances, it’s been really hard to find people that I vibed with,” he told Dazed. “You meet up for an expensive coffee, talk about how the last two weeks were, and then schedule the next. It becomes like work.”
Fragrance, he found, short-circuits all of that. At Lisbon Perfume Club’s events, guests pass blotters spritzed with a featured perfumer’s work, and the conversation spills naturally into memory, identity, and taste — the kind of subjects that take months to arrive at in ordinary social settings. Eriksson steers away from insider jargon. “This is not a competition,” he explained. “Don’t guess if this fragrance has chamomile, or if that one has rice notes: say what you feel.”
The results have been striking. “When you’re very involved in community, it’s actually hard to be lonely,” Sicardi told Dazed. “There’s definitely regulars at every event, and friendships and creative partnerships have formed out of them. People celebrate birthdays together, grab dinner before or after events, do ad-hoc scent swaps and become pen pals… I’m in group chats now that span the world.” Maksim, the founder of Helsinki Perfume Club, echoed the sentiment: “People mentioned that it creates a sense of belonging, that they’ve been looking for this kind of community for so long, and it makes their life brighter, especially during dark winters.”
There’s also a generational factor worth noting. Many of today’s most passionate fragrance enthusiasts first discovered their love of scent during the pandemic, when department store counters were off-limits and online communities became the only place to learn, discuss, and share. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both reported on the trend, with one noting that teen boys’ annual spending on fragrance rose 26 percent in the year ending in March 2024. That pent-up passion is now finding its outlet in physical spaces, with people who spent years sniffing alone finally reaching for something more.
The clubs are also doing something quietly political. At Lisbon Perfume Club’s inaugural event, the conversation drifted into a debate about the word “clean” — its slippery connotations, its embedded assumptions about what smells are desirable and why. Sicardi has leaned into this angle deliberately. “Fundamentally, there is enough of most things in the world – or would be if we shared,” they said. Perfumed Pages events regularly encourage participants to swap bottles or decant and share what they already own — a small but pointed rebuke to the relentless churn of new launches.
The Fragrance Foundation has taken notice. Its annual Fragrance Day celebration, held every March 21, has expanded into a full Fragrance Week on Madison Avenue, with rotating brand activations, perfumer visits, and panel discussions on sustainability and trends. For 2025, it debuted its first-ever Fragrance Gallery and pop-up shop at 924 Madison Avenue — a gallery-like space where consumers could sample the season’s notes from indie and designer brands alike. It’s an institutional nod to the fact that experiencing fragrance as a group is no longer just a niche hobby. It’s where the culture is headed.
For anyone curious about joining the movement, the entry point is genuinely low. Check Instagram, Eventbrite, or Meetup for fragrance clubs in your city. Bring something you love, or nothing at all. The only real requirement, beyond your nose, as Eriksson might put it, is a willingness to connect scents to something much, much deeper: a true human experience.
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