Since the beginning of time, perfume has been inextricably linked with attraction, infatuation, love, and power. Cleopatra’s thick, resinous perfume—known as the Chanel No.5 of Ancient Egypt—was a key player in how she used her attractiveness to political advantage. “Perfume has always been associated with carnality,” Barbara Herman, vintage perfume author and founder of ERIS Parfums, says. “Jacques Guerlain once said that ‘Perfume should smell like the underside of my mistress’ and Germaine Cellier was said to have included a ‘worn panties’ accord in 1944’s Bandit.” The animalic perfume explosion of the 20th century gave us the real “panty and trouser droppers” of their day, she notes.
With the rise of kinky niche scents and corporeal accords, it seems like the obsession with selling a shortcut to romance and lust is growing. But can a fragrance really make you fall in love? With the rise of scent dating, there might be a way to find out. The Scent of Connection is a London-based blind dating event using scent to match people based on smell compatibility. Using a computational board containing swaps of sweat (yes, really) stored in vials sent by attendees ahead of the night, matches are made based on attraction to scents. “How varied people's preferences are is what surprises me the most,” Jasmine from SoC tells me, lending this to the chemical signals underlying bodily smells and added scents. “There is no singular scent of attraction,” says Emma Vernon, a former matchmaker, host of podcast Perfume Room, and founder of a dating event in New York called Smells Like Love. “Scent preferences are so deeply linked with personal associations, scent memories, and intrinsic preferences that one size simply cannot fit all.”
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I ask Vernon which notes conjure up the most attraction. “Ambrette has this vegetal musk, a bit sweaty but not stinky. Amber is just so romantic,” she says. “I also think certain honey smells are the closest thing I’ve smelled to a vagina.” My ears immediately prick up. “There’s actually a scent I love that smells like roses and panties,” she says.
This vaginal honey perfume is Oliban by Keiko Mecheri. Whilst unfamiliar with said scent, I am not unfamiliar with the nose behind it. Yann Vasnier is the perfumer behind two of the perfumes in my collection that I dub the most romantic, albeit in completely contrasting ways. When I first smelled L’Objet’s Blindfol, I nearly cried. A delicate, tender musing on the first throes of romantic obsession and sensual submission, the scent is so evocative of that first bloom of infatuation that it became intertwined with my definition of falling in love. When Trudon sent me 45 Degrees, an homage to passion and desire in a glowing red bottle, I was initially perturbed by the narcotic vanilla and honey notes, which felt so audaciously forward that it was almost screaming with pleasure. But, as winter fell, it became the invisible thread running through sweaters and scarves snuggled close in the cold, the intoxicating aura of what lay beneath rising from warm, hidden skin.
On the other end of the spectrum, Andrea Maack’s Pavilion is the dark, bold ambery rose dripping in narcotic honey that I wore when I last fell in love. “It’s loosely based on Sharon Stone’s character in Basic Instinct," Maack tells me. She created the femme fatale fragrance for herself, as an act of self-love.
How can there be such different perfumes that evoke mirroring subconscious links to love? Is it possible I’ve found a perfumer who has unearthed some secret formula? “The power attributed to them stems from the wearer’s interpretation,” Yann says. “It is rather a study of perception, the way a perfume is told, worn and connected to memories.” I ask him about the magic of his perfumes and he does admit that certain ingredients he gravitates towards, such as georgywood, sylkolide and serenolide—all three synthetic musks—are particularly captivating.
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I often think of perfumery as a modern form of witchcraft, alchemizing the properties of ingredients to create a potion. Semra Haksever, eclectic witch and founder of Mama Moon Candles, sells Love Manifestation perfume oil, candles and even a love spell. “The feedback is very real,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of customers share that love has appeared in their life after using it. It’s about manifesting love for yourself. I think this makes the wearer into a magnet… Love is a side-effect of loving yourself.”
I turn to my trusted witchy source, Jessica Rossett. Jessica is a Jungian psychoanalyst working with tarot, archetypal astrology, mythology, and magical herbalism. “In Jungian psychology, we don't look at a perfume as a supernatural force,” she says. “Instead, it is a tool; the magic is in the moment the person sets the intention and aligns with the frequency of the herbs and flowers they are inviting in.” And the scents for love? “Rose opens the heart and honey invites sweetness. Oud and jasmine tap into a more primal, instinctual desire.”
Something Semra says sticks with me: “We carry ancestral DNA in our own bodies, so I wonder sometimes how much of our emotional response to scent is inherited.” Is delving into our ancestry some way of accessing a secret key to love?
Maybe we don’t have to pull out the family tree to find out. The olfactory bulb in your brain projects directly into your hippocampus and amygdala. While we have long been sold the idea of sweet roses, bouquets of flowers and boxes of candies as the triggers to a Pavlovian scent association, it is really all about your own emotions and memories. And it seems like these are far more base than we would readily like to admit.
Scenting love ultimately boils down to a cocktail of intrigue, individuality and comfort. What scents comfort you? You might think of something like freshly baked bread, a cup of tea or freshly cut grass…But if you really think about it, deep down inside your earliest memories? Skin, saliva and breast milk. And it seems like this Freudian slip is dripping itself into emerging perfume trends.
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Vernon predicts 2026 to be the year of the “Tender Weird" perfume. We already knew niche perfumery was weird, but why tender? “I like freaky, pissy, carnal, poopy scents but most people would turn their noses up at something that X-rated,” she says. “That’s why I think saliva, breast milk or unwashed skin is where we are heading. If you actually think of what a breast milk accord smells like, from a perfumer’s point of view, ultimately what you are smelling is a salty vanilla musk.”
We can’t talk about how scent can truly capture love without exploring the facets that may not be as desirable but are equally as defining. “The warmth of skin, the scent on a pillow… It was that bittersweet feeling of longing,” Chriselle Lim lists the fragile, ephemeral emotions she wanted to capture in her now-viral scent, Phlur’s Missing Person. “Missing Person was inspired during a time of deep transformation for me. I was going through a divorce, and missed the feeling of someone close to me.” To say the delicate and slightly disconcerting musky floral scent was a hit would be an understatement. After PR kits consisting of vacuum sealed bags packed with white men’s t-shirts drenched in the scent caused unboxings to end in wistful tears, it soon racked up a 200,000 person waiting list. “Love, like fragrance, reflects different seasons of your life, and I think the most meaningful scents allow space for that complexity,” she says. I, for one, can confess to spraying this on my pillow, longing for skin-on-skin comfort on lonely nights.
So, while there may not be one specific scent to make someone fall in love, there does seem to be a way to cast a spell: getting under someone’s skin, into their mind, and hopefully into their heart.
