Who gets to smell lousy and still be chic?

If you follow perfume discourse closely enough, it can start to feel like nobody wants to smell good anymore. The scent of flowers, freshness and fruits has started to feel overdone, and on their quest for looking and feeling unique, differentiation being one of the most elite things people can do.

The clean, airy perfumes that once dominated bathroom shelves have begun to feel unimaginative, even childish. In their place: scents that provoke. Animalic blends that hover uncomfortably close to body odour. Metallic notes that recall machinery or blood. Gourmands that lean savoury, vegetal, sulphurous. Perfume is now not about smelling freshly showered, it is about being noticed.

This is often framed as progress — a breaking free from rigid ideas of beauty. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm for “difficult” fragrance obscures another truth: not everyone is allowed to smell strange and be praised for it.

Smell has always operated as a form of social sorting. Long before deodorant aisles promised universal freshness, scent marked who belonged and who did not. Bodies associated with physical labour, poverty, or marginalised communities have historically been described as smelling wrong — too strong, too animal, too present. Those judgements weren’t incidental. They helped justify exclusion, surveillance, and control.

What’s striking about today’s perfume landscape is not that unpleasant smells are suddenly acceptable, but that they’re acceptable only under certain conditions. When reframed as art, when bottled and priced accordingly, when worn by people already read as tasteful, these same smells are reclassified as bold or intelligent. The scent itself doesn’t change. Its social meaning does.  

Interesting, it also seems to provide a sharp contrast with the popular ‘clean girl aesthetic’.

You can see this clearly in how context determines interpretation. Gasoline, metal, smoke, garlic, beetroot, all common notes in niche perfumery, read as edgy when worn by a well-dressed creative. On a mechanic or factory worker, those same smells are assumed to be accidental, even shameful. A cumin-heavy fragrance might be praised as sensual and intimate on one body, while the lingering scent of cooking spices on another is treated as embarrassing.

India(BHARAT) throws this contradiction into especially sharp relief. Smell in the subcontinent has long been entangled with caste, labour, and ideas of purity. Certain kinds of work — tanning, waste disposal, leatherwork, cooking with oil and spice, are expected to mark the body. The resulting smells are social, carrying assumptions about who performs which labour and who is allowed to move freely through “clean” spaces.

Against this backdrop, it’s hard not to notice the irony of Western perfumery’s recent obsessions. Notes like cumin, animalic musk, smoke, ghee-like warmth, and oud are now celebrated as provocative and luxurious.  

For many South Asian bodies, those same smells continue to invite scrutiny. The idea that someone smells like “too much masala” remains shorthand for excess, for being out of place, particularly in elite or globalised environments.

Oud is an instructive example. Used for centuries across South Asia and the Middle East, it was long dismissed in Europe as overpowering and vulgar. Only after being reworked, diluted, and narrativised by Western perfume houses did it gain cultural permission. The ingredient did not become more refined; the way it was sold did.

What makes today’s “ugly” perfumes feel daring is the gap between scent and stereotype. Smelling like sweat or garlic is transgressive only when the wearer is not expected to smell that way. It signals choice rather than necessity

This doesn’t mean experimental fragrance is inherently hollow or cynical. Some perfumers are actively pushing against these hierarchies, drawing from personal and cultural histories that have long been dismissed as olfactorily improper. When done thoughtfully, such work can unsettle ingrained ideas about what deserves to be admired.

Nevertheless, it’s worth asking what kind of freedom this trend really represents. If smelling “bad” is celebrated only when detached from the bodies historically associated with those smells, then we’re not dismantling old hierarchies — we’re simply aestheticising them.