How Is Fragrance Winning Beauty’s Attention War?
As AI Reshapes Discovery, Most Brands Aren’t Ready
From the Boy Smells rebrand and the rise of niche fragrance creators to YSL’s new Libre L’Eau Nue ads and endless MFK Baccarat Rouge dupes, fragrance has been inescapable on my social feeds for months. This week, I set out to understand why, and what I found goes far beyond another trend cycle.
I’d seen the headlines: US fragrance sales grew 12% last year to $9.5 billion, according to consumer insights firm Circana (via Business of Fashion). But my first clue came earlier, when I analysed Mecca’s buying strategy in October and was surprised to discover fragrance was its fastest-growing category. While that’s no longer the case, the growing interest has lingered, showing up again and again in my reporting.
Fragrance behaves differently than other beauty categories—how it’s written about, how it’s marketed, and how it appeals to emotion. As consumer habits shift, that difference is turning into a competitive advantage.
We’ll start by zooming out: looking at macro shifts across skincare, makeup, and fragrance to understand why cultural attention is swinging toward scent. Then we’ll dive into the business of the internet—what’s changing beneath our feet. Finally, we’ll connect the dots to reveal the brands best positioned to ride this shift. Spoiler: they’re all fragrance.
The full analysis is available to paid subscribers.
Category Growth
Let's start by looking at the 25 most high-volume search trends across skincare, makeup, and fragrance. These three categories are always relevant, but when we analyse year-over-year growth of the top search terms, we can see the pendulum swing in real numbers. I pulled this data from Glimpse, my favourite tool for spotting trends.
Skincare
Skincare, the category that had us all in a chokehold during the pandemic, maintained its reigning power for some time. Yet this once-dominant category has witnessed a notable decline over the past year, with 19 of the top 25 highest volume search terms experiencing year-on-year search decline.
The pandemic transformed skincare into a ritual of control amid chaos. It became a scientific, methodical approach to self-improvement when little else could be managed. We embraced elaborate 12-step routines, scrutinised ingredient percentages, and fell in love with learning about beauty products beyond their marketing. The clinical language of actives, formulations, and barrier repair became our collective vernacular. This shift transcended skincare, reshaping how we approach beauty entirely through a lens of ingredient literacy.
Makeup
While skincare sees 19 of its top 25 search terms declining, makeup's slightly better performance, with 14 of 25 top search terms in decline, reflects its unique positioning in beauty's shifting landscape.
Makeup occupies the middle ground between skincare's clinical approach and fragrance's emotional appeal, offering both transformation and expression in a single product. Makeup's ability to straddle both worlds has helped buffer it against the more dramatic downturns seen in pure skincare.
Fragrance
Almost every top volume search term for fragrance has experienced growth in the last year, 24 out of 25 compared to only 11 for makeup and a mere 6 for skincare. The figures speak plainly: fragrance has taken over beauty.
This is significant because fragrance is sold very differently than makeup, skincare or haircare, as the products are abstract and brands instead have to capture consumers through storytelling. This has been a throughline of my previous branding reports: fragrance brands use copywriting, colour, and persuasion differently than other beauty categories, selling an elusive feeling or 'vibe' rather than concrete benefits.
Discovering and shopping for fragrance has always been hard online, which is why fragrance is the one beauty category with wildly popular review platforms. Fragrantica, for example, had 39 million web visits last month, making it the third most popular beauty site in the world, only behind mega retailers Sephora and Ulta.
But recently, Fragrantica has undergone a transformation. Once a site for fragrance enthusiasts, it’s now seeing a major boost in organic search traffic. That means instead of people typing “fragrantica.com,” more users are searching for perfume reviews and landing on the site through search engines. (These insights were found using SimilarWeb, my favourite web analytics tool.)
The kind of in-depth product analysis that once made Fragrantica a favourite among niche fragrance communities is now resonating with a much broader audience. As our understanding of ingredients has deepened since the skincare boom, it’s becoming clear that this shift goes beyond skincare; the way we shop for beauty is fundamentally changing. One revealing indicator? Look at Fragrantica’s top referral websites.
ChatGPT. If you’re assuming this shift is happening across all beauty platforms, you’d be sorely mistaken. AI is fundamentally reshaping how we discover and shop for beauty, but fragrance is the only category truly built for it.
Shopping for Beauty is Changing
As Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, explained to CNBC, the internet's business model has been based on search for the past 15 years. A decade ago, Google would provide ten blue links that best matched your query. Today, approximately 75% of Google searches are answered directly on the results page, eliminating the need to visit other websites.
The shift from open-ended browsing to targeted search has been dramatically accelerated by AI. In the early days of the internet, Google would send roughly one visitor for every two pages it scraped. Today, that ratio has dropped to one in six. With AI tools replacing traditional search for many users, the numbers are even more stark: OpenAI reportedly scrapes 250 pages for every one it drives traffic to, while Anthropic’s Claude scrapes around 6,000 per single visit.
This steep drop in referral traffic not only undermines the incentive to create original content, but it also clouds our ability to track trends and predict consumer behaviour. Google Search has long served as a key window into cultural and market shifts—without it, that window is starting to fog.
( This is one of the key reasons I’m building Unfiltered—a review platform for no-BS beauty reviews, organised by skin concerns, age groups, ethnicities, and more. Think, all the crazy reviews on Reddit organised by brand and by product. From a B2C perspective, there’s a clear and growing demand for deeper, more personalised insights into beauty products. But on the B2B side, the industry relies heavily on trend tracking, creating a feedback loop where the same types of products are endlessly repackaged to ride the same waves. Unfiltered aims to break that cycle. By giving brands a way to analyse what consumers really want, not just what’s already selling, we can surface unmet needs and emerging desires that aren’t yet visible in sales data or social trends. You can explore the early concept here. )
Fragrance is uniquely positioned for this shift, and its recent surge in popularity reflects that. There’s a lot beauty professionals can learn from platforms like Fragrantica, especially when it comes to adapting to the decline in web traffic. These sites offer a blueprint for how to stay relevant in a search-driven, AI-influenced landscape. Want to know why they’re built to survive this shift? Keep reading.