Trending Beauty Data: Fragrance
Measuring The Influence of Niche Communities on Mass Trends
Fragrance is outpacing every other category in beauty1. In my last report, How Is Fragrance Winning Beauty’s Attention War?, I explored why it’s become the industry’s fastest-growing segment. But one detail I couldn’t shake was the quiet power of niche fragrance communities.
These communities have been shaping the fragrance landscape for over a decade, but how much influence do they really have? Can Reddit forums actually move the needle on mass-market trends? And what can brands learn by tuning into these hyper-engaged spaces?
This week, I set out to answer this. I analysed over 10,000 Reddit comments to identify patterns within niche fragrance communities, then scraped the top 15 trending scents on Parfumo to trace their broader influence. Finally, we’ll look at the fastest-growing mass fragrances to uncover exactly how grassroots chatter turns into mainstream momentum.
This is part two in my Trend Series, where I unpack the biggest beauty trends and work backwards to uncover how they gained traction. You can read part one here, or explore my method for analysing trends here.
Full analysis, data, and visualisations are available to paid subscribers.
Method
To start, I wanted to understand the topics and behaviours organically trending within niche fragrance communities. As always, my go-to for unfiltered opinions and an authentic snapshot of online subcultures is Reddit. By analysing over 10,000 comments from the most active fragrance forums, I identified the most frequently mentioned phrases, topics, notes, and brands.
Next, I gathered the top five trending fragrances for each gender category—unisex, men’s, and women’s—on Parfumo. I chose Parfumo over Fragrantica after 807 TikTok users convincingly explained why it’s a superior platform, both in terms of user experience and its distance from conservative politics.
I then compared these trending products to the Reddit findings, breaking down each fragrance by its top, heart, and base notes. This allowed me to track not just which products are resonating, but also which scent profiles are rising in popularity.
Finally, I mapped this data against three of the biggest current scent trends—using Google search volume and YoY growth—to explore how niche Reddit communities and review platforms like Parfumo are quietly shaping mainstream fragrance preferences.
Reddit Community Trends
From my initial research, it became clear that not all fragrance communities are created equal, so instead of focusing on just one, I chose to analyse two.
r/Fragrance
With over 2.3 million subscribers, r/Fragrance is the largest fragrance forum on Reddit. Created in early 2011, the subreddit gets over 30 new posts a day, hundreds of comments, and also has a dedicated Discord server where 7,000 members chat across topic-specific fragrance rooms.
What’s interesting about this community is its size. While Reddit forums are typically niche by nature, this one is far from exclusive. With minimal rules and virtually no moderation, it’s become the go-to space for all kinds of fragrance-related questions for newcomers and enthusiasts alike.
Topic Trends
I collected 5,664 comments across 264 posts, and interestingly, the most common topic wasn’t a product, brand, or even a scent—it was a behaviour: blind buying. For those unfamiliar, blind buying refers to the act of purchasing a fragrance without ever having smelled it. With 76 mentions of “blind buying” and another 27 of “blind buy,” this behaviour emerged as the most frequently discussed topic across the community.
This is fascinating because it directly reflects the influence these communities (and platforms like Parfumo) now hold. They’re enabling purchases without any of the traditional fragrance marketing tools, like sampling or in-store testing. People are willing to buy based purely on peer reviews and online conversations, a wild departure from how fragrance has historically been sold.
Beyond bling buying, the most mentioned topics were:
What stands out most is how each of these topics is a branded term. This ties back to a key point from last week’s report—online fragrance communities often step in where traditional marketing falls short. Conversations around ingredient quality, composition, longevity, performance, and especially comparisons to other fragrances, provide essential reference points for consumers navigating a category that is otherwise difficult to experience digitally. In effect, the high-budget, editorial fragrance campaigns are trickling down through community dialogue, shaping purchase decisions in a far more grassroots, peer-driven way.
As a fragrance amateur myself, I was surprised to see Guerlain emerge as the second most-discussed topic—I didn’t even know they made fragrances. Guerlain’s prominence highlights the quiet strength of heritage brands in these communities and their ability to stay relevant, even when they’re largely absent from mainstream beauty discourse.
Another notable insight is the role of gender. The frequent use of terms like L’Homme (French for "man") suggests a strong interest in male-specific scents. Yet, every top-mentioned product was technically unisex. This indicates that these communities aren’t exclusively driven by women, highlighting another way fragrance stands apart from other beauty categories.
r/ Perfumes
These insights become particularly interesting when we compare them to trending topics amongst a smaller fragrance subreddit, r/Perfumes. With 206,000 members, r/Perfumes is by no means a small community, and despite being half the size of r/Fragrance, it gets almost double the daily posts.
However, many of those posts do not stay up for long. r/Perfumes has much stricter rules and heavier moderation compared to r/Fragrance. For example, posts that duplicate previously answered questions are removed, and generalist prompts—like “What’s the best (ingredient) perfume?” or “Which (scent family) is the best?”—aren’t permitted.
Topic Trends
In the 5,132 comments I analysed across 284 posts, the impact of strict moderation was clear, “rules” was mentioned 281 times. While this level of control limits the volume of content, it results in highly targeted insights into this community. Among the posts that remained on the site over the last 6months, the most popular topics were:
The number of trending topics in r/Perfumes was noticeably smaller, a direct result of the subreddit’s strict moderation policies. But what stood out most wasn’t just the volume of discussion, it was the tone of it.
Unlike r/Fragrance, which was more brand-driven, r/Perfumes was far more focused on scent profiles. The only shared topic across both communities was "Tom Ford Vanille," but even that differed: in r/Fragrance, it referred to the product, while in r/Perfumes, it pointed to the note vanilla more broadly.
This reveals a distinction between the two forums: the more niche the community, the less branded the language becomes. While r/Fragrance users often frame discussions around specific products or labels as a point of reference to less fragrance-educated audiences, r/Perfumes users speak in the vocabulary of ingredients and accords.
For marketers, brand managers, and product developers, this distinction is critical. While mass audiences respond to branded messaging, niche communities—often the earliest adopters—engage more deeply with scent itself. The more niche the community, the better it is at surfacing note-based trends long before they’re bottled into bestselling SKUs.
Parfumo
With this context in mind, we can turn to Parfumo to trace how these communities may be shaping product interest. I analysed the platform’s trending “Often Owned” section, arguably the best point of reference for purchase behaviour, and selected the top five fragrances across men's, women’s, and unisex categories.
Right away, signs of Reddit conversations begin to appear. Brands like YSL and Tom Ford show up, but it’s by analysing the top, heart, and base notes that we gain a clearer picture of how niche chatter filters into mainstream buying patterns.