There are very few people whose fragrance recommendations I will take without question, and Clayton Ilolahia is one of them. We first met seated next to each other at a Creed launch at the Sydney Opera House and I have been in what I openly call professional crush mode with him ever since. He is one of three people I will publicly admit to that crush about. The other two are Roger Dove and Michael Edwards, and Clayton works in the same world as both.
He is an independent fragrance evaluator, deeply embedded in the global perfume industry, and one of the most thoughtful voices on where this category is heading next.
I had him on the show because I wanted to talk about the shifts I am watching in real time: the death of celebrity fragrance; the takeover by niche and the rise of an entirely new category that the industry has not quite named yet but that I believe is the most important development in perfume since the gourmand.
What we ended up with was a conversation about why fragrance is the most underexamined neurological tool in the beauty cabinet, and why the next decade of the industry will be defined by people finally taking it seriously.
Fragrance as the ultimate time machine
Clayton and I share a conviction that has shaped both of our adult lives. Scent is the most direct time machine available to a human being. Smell something your mother wore when you were five and you are not remembering being five. You are five.
Clayton makes the point that this works regardless of the price of the bottle. His great-grandmother’s fragrance was a L’Aimant, the old Coty L’Aimant, which you can still pick up in a discount pharmacy for almost nothing. The transportive power of it is exactly the same as a $400 niche bottle, because the wiring in the brain is not paying attention to the price. It is paying attention to the molecule.
“To give me that moment with my great-grandmother costs almost nothing. It is not about having to spend a lot of money to have a better experience with perfume.” – Clayton Ilolahia
My own first fragrance memory is being five years old in Iran and being given a bottle of Karl Lagerfeld Chloé in the parfum by my father. He had returned from a business trip to Paris and brought me my own bottle because I had developed the habit of stealing his Christian Dior pocket square that he doused in Eau Sauvage before he travelled. My grandmother used to tell me that if I missed him I could smell the pocket square and he would be back soon. I still own a bottle of Chloé by Lagerfeld. I still wear Eau Sauvage to be close to him. None of this is sentimental. It is neurological. And it is the foundation of why I take fragrance as seriously as I do.
Why niche won
Clayton has the cleanest read I have heard on what has actually happened to the fragrance market in the last decade. Niche used to be, as the word suggests, a small part of the larger industry. People working at the big houses with the big budgets would defect, set up something small and artisanal, focus on the juice rather than the marketing campaign, and quietly build a cult following. Frederic Malle, Le Labo, By Kilian, the early Goldfield and Banks Australian collection, the early Amouage out of Oman.
That dynamic has now inverted. Niche is no longer the niche and according to Clayton, when the team at the global classification authority Fragrances of the World, looks at what is being launched worldwide right now, niche has become the dominant share of new fragrance releases. The mass-market designer fragrance is in retreat, and the celebrity fragrance is essentially over.
The bigger brands have responded by building niche-feeling lines inside their own walls, which is why Les Exclusives de Chanel exists, why Christian Dior has the La Collection Privée, why Tom Ford has Private Blend, and why almost every credible luxury house now has a parallel collection running at a higher price point with smaller production runs.
What Clayton sees from his vantage point is that this is a global, structural shift, not a trend. Niche houses are launching out of Istanbul, Mexico City, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sydney. The Ottoman Empire, as he reminded me, actually invented steam distillation. The countries that have always supplied raw materials to the great French perfumers are starting to become destinations in their own right. Australia, through what Dimitri Weber has built with Goldfield and Banks, is part of the same broader rise.
The category the industry has not quite named yet
This is the part of the conversation I keep returning to, because I think it is the most important. I asked Clayton, as someone who professionally evaluates the entire global pipeline of fragrance, what he makes of the new functional fragrance category. The bottles that promise mood. The launches that claim wellbeing benefits. The Charlotte Tilbury collaboration with International Flavors and Fragrances on a range that explicitly markets emotional and libidinal effects. The Goop launch that became its own news cycle (This Smells Like My Vagina candle, broke the internet). The Bella Hadid line Orabella that sits halfway between skincare and scent.
His answer was the most validating thing he could have said. The oil houses that produce the bulk of the world’s fragrance, IFF, Givaudan and in particular the leading oil house, DSM Firmenich, are now investing genuinely significant R&D into the neuroscience of scent. Real scientific research on how specific fragrance molecules affect mood, emotion, focus, sleep, libido. The same houses that used to develop fragrance purely against a creative brief from a designer or a celebrity are now developing fragrance against measurable physiological outcomes. This is a structural change in how perfume is made, not a marketing trend.
“The oil houses are doing a lot of research into the neuroscience behind fragrance. Actual scientific research on how fragrances affect people. It is a really exciting space.” – Clayton Ilolahia
This is what I have been arguing for years and now have the most credentialed independent voice in Australian fragrance saying out loud. The next decade of perfume will be defined by mood. Not by celebrity, not by fashion house, not by gourmand drift. By the application of neuroscience to a category that has, until now, been allowed to remain mystical. The brands paying attention to this shift will be the brands that matter in five years. The brands clinging to the old model of pretty bottle, vague marketing copy, ambiguous notes pyramid, will not.
The scientific foundation underneath this is more credentialed than most consumers realise. In 2004, Richard Axel and Linda Buck won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of how the human olfactory system actually works, identifying the family of roughly 1,000 genes (about three per cent of the human genome) that code for our scent receptors. That single piece of research did for olfaction what the discovery of the structure of DNA did for genetics. It moved smell from the realm of the mystical into the realm of the testable.
The fragrance houses Clayton refers to have been building on that foundation ever since. DSM Firmenich, founded in Geneva in 1895 and now the world’s largest privately owned fragrance and taste company, began a formal collaboration with the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences at the University of Geneva in 2005, co-funded the Brain and Behavior Laboratory in 2009, and opened its own Cognition and Behavior Laboratory in 2018. Their programme now spans over thirty years of cumulative research into how specific molecules trigger specific emotional and physiological responses, fed by a proprietary database of forty thousand tested fragrances and over a million consumer insights. This is the perfume industry mapping the human nervous system, at scale, with the explicit intention of engineering fragrance against measurable outcomes. The mystical era of perfume is ending. The empirical one is beginning. That is what Clayton is pointing at.
The discovery set as the new entry point
One of the most practical shifts in the industry that Clayton and I both celebrate is the rise of the discovery set. Five or six years ago, almost no fragrance brand in Australia offered a proper discovery format. Now almost every credible brand does. The Amouage Secret Garden discovery box is one of the most beautiful objects in fragrance retail right now. Penhaligon’s, Jo Malone, the once-a-year Le Labo city exclusives set, and the Nishane discovery collection from Istanbul are all worth ordering on their own merits and I am an avid collector of these discovery sets.
Clayton singled out the Nishane set in particular as one of the most exciting expressions of where niche fragrance is heading globally.
Why this matters The discovery set removes the single biggest barrier to entry in fine fragrance, which is the cost of being wrong. A 50ml bottle that you do not love after a week is a $200 to $400 mistake. A discovery set of five vials is the most efficient education in your own preferences you can buy for $50 to $100. This is how you build fragrance literacy and confidence. This is how you learn what your nose and skin chemistry responds to. It is the equivalent, in Clayton’s analogy, of being raised in France and growing up at the table drinking wine. You develop discernment by being exposed to range, with low stakes, repeatedly.
Where I shop, and why
Clayton and I are both committed pharmacy fragrance hunters. He has shopped vintage Guerlain in old Cannes pharmacies and an old Hong Kong perfumery in Kowloon that was stocked with original gold-packaging Guerlain bottles. I take my fifteen-year-old daughter Lilly on what I call fragrance safaris through Sephora or niche fragrance boutique, Libertine Parfumerie when I want her to experience high niche, and to Ultra Beauty and Chemist Warehouse when I want to introduce her to the well-priced designer fragrances that shaped my own youth. All of those Australian destinations are doing genuinely interesting work as accessibility-led discovery environments for designer fragrance. They are not where you go to discover the next Amouage, they are where you go to retrace your own fragrance steps, find the bottle you wore at university, and pay $50 for the dopamine hit of being nineteen again for an afternoon.
The question to ask before you buy
Clayton gave my listeners a piece of homework at the end of the conversation that I want every reader to do. Go back through the ten fragrances you have worn through your life that meant something to you. Smell them again. Notice what they have in common. Use that as your map for what you should be reaching for next.
I added one question to his exercise. Before you buy any new fragrance, for yourself or as a gift, ask yourself one thing. How do you want to feel? Not how do you want to smell. How do you want to feel. Confident. Sensual. Calm. Powerful. Romantic. Available. Untouchable. Sexy. Grounded? The bottle is just a delivery mechanism. The feeling is the actual product. And the moment the industry collectively realises that, the entire conversation about fragrance changes.
Clayton, more than almost anyone working in this category in Australia right now, already has.
Listen to the full conversation with Clayton Ilolahia on the Ageless Radiance Club podcast.
