Words by Valery Stoianova
Edited by Valerie Aitova
How many times have you turned around on the street searching for a person from your past, just because you heard their scent? To be honest, I can feel it a few times per day. Like your outfit, perfume is a statement that we present to others. Thanks to it, you can be dangerous, soft or eccentric. It all depends on what you want today.
Perfume reflects the spirit of the times it was made in. For the ancient Egyptians, it was a status symbol; for the French in the Middle Ages, it was a way to escape unsanitary conditions. In the 90s and 00s, perfume culture emphasised sexuality and unleashed the secrets hidden behind the masks that people wear every day. As with any art, perfumery is a cross-section of its time, in which a particular fragrance was created. Understanding of modern olfactory trends can give us not only a new experience of smell, but also show what our society breathes and how its spirits change. Surely we must not forget that aroma is quite intimate for each person. With its help, we can transfer ourselves to certain emotions and situations we have experienced.
As you can see, the topic of fragrances is multifaceted and can be discussed endlessly. To dive deeper into it and save a little time in the discussion, we decided to trust the professionals who show and tell us about olfactory art expertly. Our team visited the first edition of Niche Show London 2025. The exhibition founded by Lee Martin included 35 brands and of course, it is quite difficult to cover so many brands. He gathered under one roof almost the entire globe, including the Middle East, representatives of Europe, Asia and Canada. But I would like to highlight several discoveries that were unlike anything for me and which conquered me with their concept and composition.
Zoologist is a well-known brand in the world of niche perfumery, and still, this was their first show. The Canadian brand founded by Victor Wong has a long list of fragrances for every taste: from spicy to floral. The main theme is dedicating a fragrance to a certain animal. The idea is not new, but Zoologist manages to play with it uniquely. One of the main fragrance trends is the scent of the sea and they caught it straight away.
Now you need to turn on your imagination a little. You are a pirate after a long battle and tons of dark, quiet ocean water beneath you. There is a pistol in your hands that needs to be carefully wiped of gunpowder. Your old ship, soaked in salt, has withstood another battle and the cannons have fallen silent. The deck is slightly damp from the waves and there is a deathly silence in the air. You raise your head and a black cloud is approaching you, in a few seconds a storm will begin. This is the feeling that the “Portuguese Man of War” gives. A very new scent of zoologist created by Antoine Lie gives a unique experience of freedom and sweeps you away.
The practice of creating fragrances is far from new, let’s take Salvador Dali for example, who had his own collection of perfumes. He immersed surrealism in bottles, creating a performance not only in the form of paintings but also in the bottles of fragrances themselves.
Contemporary artists continue this legacy by combining visual and olfactory narratives for a fully immersive experience. A young brand TOBBA perfumes from Hong Kong combines Asian heritage with a modern twist. Its creator, who is also an abstract artist, Jasper Li, tries to convert his feelings about paintings through scents. Together with his co-founder, Adrian Yu, they presented the collection. The brand adds ingredients that have rarely been used before and combinations that you wouldn’t think of right away. Perfume “Force”, combines a minty beginning and incense and balm in the end. All together it gives a multi-layered composition that resembles a secret passage in an abandoned theatre.
Fragrance is one of the ways to transport our consciousness to another world. For these few seconds, we find ourselves in the reality created by the author, complementing it with our own worldview. One of these artists was Tulpa Club, created by Ajay Sameer. The perfumer offers a complete story for each perfume, backing it up with a comic book that introduces us to the universe of the fragrance. According to the author, the most controversial piece is the “Gunsmoke saloon”. This is the aroma of a saloon in the Wild West after a revolver battle. A broken bottle of whiskey hits the nose first, followed by gunpowder and hot wood. Although the scent sounds harsh and unusual at first, it calms down a little as you wear it, leaving a pleasant enveloping sandalwood with a hint of gunpowder.
Some of the perfumers featured at the exhibition do not stop at perfumes, but are artists and combine visual and olfactory narratives. Another perfumer with an artistic background and unique presentation came to London from Turkey. The brand of Tahir Cengiz Yatagan is a Puzzle Perfume and has 5 positions, each of which is revealed not only with the help of the aroma, but also the bottle, which is also the author’s sculpture.
Speaking of the soul, I would like to focus on the Neshama brand. Its founder Simon Shaer offers 4 fragrances created in London, but telling completely different stories. The “Nine Wave”, inspired by Aivazovsky’s painting, sends us to the destroyed deck of a ship with burnt wood and a light note of bergamot. The name itself is translated as “soul”, it is felt that its author put a piece of himself into it.
The East has always occupied one of the main places in the creation of unique fragrances. From there came to us notes of oud, sandalwood, rose and many other ingredients that are now common in olfactory dictionaries. The show gave us something unique in this field. Several brands were especially memorable. One of them was Kymya. The collection has only three fragrances, but each of them is strong-willed and thick. It will be appreciated by lovers of high-quality oud. The Cambodian one in “Kambodi” takes us to the ruins of ancient cities, covered with sun and dust.
It is important to talk about very young brands that are taking their first steps in the industry but are already ready to express themselves through fragrance. Many niche brands choose to become part of a large conglomerate, increasing profits, but at the same time losing their uniqueness and quality. For example, Francis Kurkdjian House, who created the modern classic “Baccarat Rouge 540”, was sold to the LVMH concern in 2017. The fragrance is loved and hated at the same time now, because it has become very popular over the past few years. But experienced perfume fans and experts can feel the difference between the product produced before and today’s one.That’s why it is important to support young and still small representatives of this business. RNDL is a London brand that presented its collection of 3 fragrances for the first time. They have a gloss of Richmond and Mayfair. “Circus” was a special discovery for me. The feeling of a night ball in a French chateau, silk dresses on which amaretto was poured, subdued light from dying candles and fireworks in the dark.
London brand AFOWER also debuted with two fragrances. “Blue Iris” reminisces about the aesthetics of the ’90s. An interesting combination of cashmere with dark flowers gives a rather bourgeois sound, filled with aesthetics and artistry. Perhaps these fragrances could be used by the heroines of such movies as Mulholland Drive or Blue Velvet.
A young brand from South Korea has prepared quite comfortable fragrances that fit you like a second skin. Having created its brand quite recently, Shim Ilhwa shares a journey into different stories, using high-quality components from his brand ORGAN TALE. All the fragrances are different from each other and they are quite light and wearable. For example “Gerentia Fragante” immerses us in a boudoir evening after the ballet, when it is time to discuss the dance performance while sitting on a velvet chair. Jasmine in the middle pleasantly makes friends with amber, and a light note of blackcurrant.
Speaking about perfume trends, now, after a kaleidoscope of the most vivid memories, we suggest going through the main trends that will haunt us in the world of perfume for the next few years. After all, like clothing and any kind of art, fragrances convey the state of society as a whole, confess the secret desires of the world and, like a mirror, reflect our desires.
As the professionals themselves admitted, the next couple of years will be covered with milky, more floral and sweet notes. For about 7 years, the main fashionable ingredients were leather, smoky and woody fragrances. These were chypre compositions that tried in every possible way to suffocate us with wood, suede and leather. But as in the history of art, after the Baroque with its bulky and pompous structures came the light and bright Rococo, fresher fragrances are coming back into fashion. Aquatics are gaining more and more popularity along with sweeter and floral sounds.
According to the forecasts of the perfumers themselves, the future belongs to milky notes, pineapple, grass and violets. You will often hear pistachio and dessert sweetness, gourmand and more understandable compositions. This can be compared with the return of the 00s fashion, which included rather seductive sexualized fragrances, which eventually became cult like “Poison” by Dior and “Opium” by Yves Saint Laurent. Trendy and wearable composition was made by The Gate, a French fragrance founded by Fady Adwan. “Golden hour” is a sunny slightly fruity perfume made from high-end ingredients. The perfume won the “Best new launch fragrance 2025” at the event.
Perhaps the biggest change from the past is the even greater unisex nature of fragrances. Men can express their femininity through floral and sweet notes, while women can always embrace heavier, more masculine scents to emphasise their strength of character. The restructuring of roles while maintaining one’s identity is noticeable in the choice of fragrances today, and the key is to not be afraid to make such choices, regardless of one’s gender.
Also, the choice of such scent pallets shows quite a lot about society’s atmosphere. Modern fragrances scream that we are tired of complexities. It demands changes, asks for lightness and simplicity of Y2K to return. And we try to create this calm and a sense of celebration in dark times precisely through fragrances. It is the demand for escape from problems that dictates such a choice of fresh, gourmet and perhaps sometimes even deliberately seductive notes.
Choosing a fragrance is a delicate and rather difficult matter. In our time of huge conglomerates that buy niche houses on rails and make them as much a part of unconscious consumerism as mass market clothes, it is nice to plunge into something unique, into a statement that makes sense. After the show and some thought of what perfume means, I concluded that this is an adventure into an unknown place for us. And as after every journey, you arrive a bit different. The Niche Show London 2025 gave this possibility. Also, it shows the story behind each bottle with the creators themselves offline. Intellectual olfactory shows not only the author’s views but also goes deeply inside the audience’s problems, reflecting them and giving more than just a perfume. But understanding ourselves.
