A small group gathers around a table. Everyone has brought something to share. Opinions, recommendations, disagreements, and the occasional knowing nod when someone mentions a particularly good find fill the air. People compare favorites, swap discoveries, and leave with a growing list of things they now desperately want to try. It sounds like a book club. Only there are no books.
Instead, the table is covered in fragrance bottles, blotter strips, and half-finished glasses of wine. Someone is passing around a woody extrait nobody else has heard of. Another guest is insisting that a $200 niche scent smells suspiciously similar to something much cheaper. Notes are debated, bottles are swapped, and wrists are held out for second opinions. Welcome to the age of the perfume club.
Following trend reporters who declare disconnection from the internet as “a new luxury,” Olle Eriksson, founder of Lisbon Perfume Club (@lisbonperfumeclub), told BeautyMatter that “consumers have a huge craving to discover things offline, and to do things away from screens.” Fragrance is one way to satisfy that hunger.
Across London, New York, Lisbon, China, and beyond, perfume clubs are bringing enthusiasts together to blind-smell scents, meet founders and perfumers, compare collections, and experience fragrance alongside everything from food and wine to books, cinema, and botanical gardens.
The irony is that perfume clubs are emerging just as fragrance has become more online than ever. TikTok—which currently houses 8M posts under #perfumetiktok—has transformed how consumers discover scent. The app has turned once-obscure niche fragrances like Giardini di Toscana's Bianco Latte into viral names and given rise to a new vocabulary of “compliment getters,” layering combinations, and perfumes that supposedly smell like everything from clean laundry to an expensive hotel lobby. But for all the platform has done for fragrance discovery, one inconvenient limitation remains: nobody has worked out how to smell through a screen.
In that context, logging off is no longer just about reducing screen time; increasingly, being fully present somewhere, and being able to smell a fragrance, can feel like a premium experience in itself. Scent is inherently physical, but it is also unusually conversational. One person smells vanilla; another smells smoke. A fragrance that reminds someone of a summer holiday can transport somebody else straight back to their grandmother’s house. Unlike scrolling through reviews alone, smelling alongside other people creates an immediate reason to talk.
Fragrance house Givaudan sees these social functions becoming increasingly important. According to research presented by the company, 43% of women and 46% of men say their ideal perfume offers a sense of social belonging. As Arnault Guggenbuhl, Givaudan’s Head of Global Marketing, Insight & Image, Fine Fragrances, put it: “It is easy to smell good, but fragrance now has a key role in helping us say hello.”
That helps explain why perfume clubs feel particularly well suited to the current moment. They transform fragrance from something consumers simply wear, collect, or post about into something they can actually gather around. Crucially, they offer something TikTok cannot: the chance to discover a fragrance before an algorithm, influencer, or comment section tells you what you are supposed to think about it.
While a perfume club can involve sitting around a table and talking about scent, that's increasingly only the starting point.
At events held by fragrance discovery company Juice!, guests experience a collection of scents in curated ways. One housed a “scented cinema” with perfumer Jean-Charles Mignon of CPL Aromas, allowing attendees to experience scent alongside films. Another paired fragrance with a sound bath, exploring the relationship between scent, sound, and vibration. Guests were also invited to make fragrance themselves with one of the UK’s major fragrance manufacturers.
For Noor Khan, co-founder of Juice! (@sniffjuice), that variety is intentional. The aim is to show that fragrance experiences don't have to follow the familiar formula of bottles, blotters, and brand presentation. Its first event took the form of a “tasting menu,” introducing attendees to six brands, including niche names not readily available in the UK. The premise is less a perfume seminar than entertainment, with scent as the common thread.
The Lisbon Perfume Club has taken that idea even further. For one event, marking the launch of a banana fragrance, Eriksson built an entire evening around the fruit. Guests drank banana cocktails and ate banana pastries. Attendees arrived dressed in yellow. Two drag queens came dressed, appropriately, as bananas. “It was very, very thematic,” Eriksson said.
At another gathering, guests walked through a botanical garden while smelling six or seven fragrances from Canadian house Zoologist, whose scents are inspired by animals and their habitats. Each fragrance was matched with a different ecological environment inside a greenhouse, allowing attendees to smell the perfume in surroundings that echoed the world it was trying to evoke.
The club has also staged an event inside a bookshop, one that proved popular enough that Eriksson said guests repeatedly asked when the next edition would take place. For him, that crossover is part of the appeal. “Perfume can be so much more than just a scent that you wear,” he said. “It can be something that evokes a memory or a feeling.”
Scent Club UK (@scent.club.uk) takes a slightly more intimate approach, but its events are no less experimental. Founder Anastasiya Gostieva builds each gathering around a theme, with previous editions pairing wine with fragrance, gourmand perfumes with desserts, and scent with interpretive postcard drawing.
Attendees also follow a ritual around how they smell. Gostieva regularly introduces fragrances blind, withholding the brand, notes, and fragrance pyramid until after guests have formed their own impressions. They are encouraged to guess notes, describe the memories a scent brings up, and work out what it reminds them of before discovering what is actually inside the bottle. That can be particularly revealing among fragrance enthusiasts, who may otherwise approach a scent carrying expectations shaped by its brand, price, perfumer, or reputation.
Guests are then encouraged to contribute to what Gostieva calls a “hand bar,” bringing fragrances from their own collections that fit the evening’s theme and passing them around the group. The result is part tasting session, part show-and-tell. Regular attendees return month after month, while newcomers can arrive knowing comparatively little about fragrance.
That matters because perfume can be an intimidating category to enter. Khan recalled conversations around something as basic as the distinction between top, middle, and base notes or between different fragrance concentrations, knowledge the industry can sometimes assume consumers already possess. Within a club, “no question is stupid,” Gostieva said.
There is also considerably more room for irreverence. At a branded counter, consumers may hesitate to say they dislike a scent, have smelled too many products, or to tell a sales associate that the perfume being presented reminds them suspiciously of something another company already makes. Among fellow enthusiasts, those inhibitions disappear. “You have the opportunity to call out a dupe when you want to,” Khan joked.
That openness is precisely what separates the club environment from traditional fragrance retail. “When you're having a discussion amongst friends, peers, or passionate individuals, so much more comes out of it,” Khan said.
For a category built around an “invisible” product, perfume clubs are making discovery considerably more tangible. The fragrance may get people through the door, but increasingly, the experience around it gives them a reason to stay.
For brands, perfume clubs offer access to a small but highly engaged audience: consumers willing to spend an evening smelling, discussing, and learning about fragrance.
That makes them particularly interesting for emerging labels. Khan sees Juice! as part community platform, part event producer, helping brands with PR, logistics, operations, and consumer-facing experiences without requiring them to build an audience from scratch.
Eriksson sees similar value in Lisbon Perfume Club, which is always a free event promoting the democratization of fragrance. Part of his motivation for launching it came from attending fragrance events that felt heavily geared toward influencers, including people with little connection to perfume itself. His aim was to reach “normal, real people that are actually clients that buy perfume.”
The trade-off is scale for depth. A TikTok may reach thousands, but a club can put a fragrance directly into the hands of consumers who truly want to engage with it. Erikson believes those experiences can “create sales and buzz in a way that a traditional launch just won't do.”
The challenge will be preserving what makes the format appealing in the first place. If every event becomes a sponsored launch or every conversation ends in a sales pitch, clubs risk recreating the commercial pressure consumers were trying to escape. For brands, the opportunity is likely about owning the community rather than finding a credible way to participate in it.
The significance of perfume clubs is less about the format itself than what it says about where fragrance discovery is heading. Consumers are not abandoning digital platforms, but they are becoming more selective about what they want those platforms to do. TikTok can generate awareness, accelerate trends, and put niche brands in front of new audiences. What it cannot replicate is the kind of education, trial, and relationship building that happens in person.
That gap creates a real opportunity for brands. For established players, perfume clubs offer a way to deepen engagement beyond reach and impressions. For emerging brands, they can provide access to highly interested consumers without the cost of building a standalone retail footprint or competing entirely through paid social. For retailers and event operators, there is also scope to turn fragrance discovery into programming rather than simply merchandising.
The opportunity, however, depends on restraint. The more these spaces become indistinguishable from conventional brand activations, the less valuable they become. That may be the clearest lesson for the category: As fragrance becomes more crowded, discovery itself is becoming a product. The brands that benefit will be those that understand how to participate in that experience without overwhelming it.
