How to Smell Expensive

It's Valentine's Day & you need to be smellmaxxing

Years ago my friend met Bruce Springsteen on his book tour. I was very jealous, and when she described their quick hug and picture together she grinned and said “he smelled expensive.”

Bruce is worth emulating in most ways to me, including scent. So I’ve always been a bit curious about what that actually meant. Was it his leather jacket, which I imagine is not cheap? The raw pheromones that you earn by captivating crowds for 50 years? Or is it some tincture he wears, something you or I could theoretically buy?

An (old) springsteen leather jacket on my favorite album cover of all time

I don’t know very much about perfume or cologne. But I am aware that interest in it has surged among Gen Z, somewhat counterintuitively beginning during the pandemic:

Google Trends data on perfume and cologne. Bizarre that people started buying more cologne when they stopped seeing other people in person.

It’s also come across my desk that some young people are “smellmaxxing,” or mixing and matching scents to capture their own essence, or something. This 2024 NYT article on the term describes Logan embodying a brand marketer’s dream:

Ask a teenager why he wants a $200 bottle of cologne, and he might tell you he’s “smellmaxxing,” a term for enhancing one’s musk that is spreading on social media. “I started seeing a lot of videos on TikTok and thought, I don’t want to miss out,” said Logan, a 14-year-old in Chicago who has been putting his bar mitzvah money toward a collection of high-end colognes.

I played soccer last night and a guy on the opposing team was wearing a lot of cologne. It may have been a tactical decision, because it was strong enough that I didn’t want to guard him. I guess it may have been an expensive cologne but it didn’t mix well with sweat and I would’ve paid not to smell it.

It reminded me of that conversation about Bruce, and made me wonder if there were certain scents that just smell expensive. My guess is that perfume is like wine, where more expensive bottles are well-balanced and complex. But I thought i’d see if certain ingredients are particularly associated with expensive scents.

This led me to Wikiparfum, which has a big database of perfumes and their ingredients, broken down by price level. For example, this scent from Byredo contains Violet, Indian Rose, and Bergamot, among other ingredients, and is classified as “niche,” the most expensive level. It retails for $230 for 1.7oz, which feels pretty expensive to me (although I bet big baller Logan in Chicago wears it as his daytime scent to AP Euro).

Byredo Bal d’Afrique from Wikparfum

I scraped¹ the the 400 most popular perfumes and analyzed the ingredient lists and prices. I learned a few interesting things.

The nicest perfumes tend not to be associated with a gender

First, the “niche” or craft perfume houses tend to market their scents as unisex (the Byredo scent above is an example of that; it’s just marketed as eau de parfum, not associated with a gender):

On the other hand, the Prestige and Mass Market categories fit my naive conception of perfume and cologne being separate categories. I think I remember rubbing an ad for Polo Black from a cologne ad in a Sports Illustrated when I was kid; this cologne is classified as “Prestige” and is associated with men.

The most expensive ingredients

Plotting the ingredients by how common they are and how frequently they’re associated with expensive perfumes, we can get a sense of which ingredients might smell expensive.

Of the most common ingredients, it seems like Musk and Sandalwood and Amber are associated with the “niche” / expensive scent houses just as often as with prestige or mass perfumes in this sample. On the other hand, Patchouli is more frequently in cheaper perfumes; maybe one to steer clear of.

There are lots of fun ingredients, some of which I have never heard of, that are used almost exclusively in the more expensive perfumes:

Chantilly Cream, for example, is in this perfume which sounds like a desert at Carbone:

I’m not entirely sure what Springsteen would wear but Black Tea and Australian Sandalwood seem like they’d smell good and suit him.

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If you’re going out for Valentine’s Day tonight make sure to get your hands on some Galbanum!

If you want a pick-me-up, I love watching old interviews like this one because Springsteen is so obviously doing what he was born to do, and it is really powerful to hear that in someone’s voice—

1. Hopefully that is okay with the good people at Wikiparfum; it’s not entirely clear to me how they make money but go browse their site if you want personalized perfume recs!