Amanda of We Wear Perfume is also founder of Barnes Fragrance Fair, the first ever in the UK, so is well placed to ask why fragrance fairs are popping up all over the globe.
As an accidental fragrance fair entrepreneur, I find myself unexpectedly part of a global phenomenon shaking up the way fragrance is sold.
We’re living in a magical moment for fragrance, we all know this. Not only are sales high – Euromonitor* predicts fragrance will drive a 23% growth in the beauty category by 2029 – and new fragrance launches abundant, but we’re increasingly seeing clever, creative people chose fragrance as a place to launch careers by creating niche brands, bringing innovative thinking and artful new formulations to the market.
Actually shopping for these fragrances, however, has been less fun, due in part to the lack of shelf space in traditional beauty halls and fragrance stores, who are already laden with global brands reluctant to give up any of their hard won fragrance footprint. Online is growing, of course, but buying with a click is, well, boring.
Perhaps this is why we find ourselves not just with a great moment for fragrance, but at a pivotal moment for how we buy it. Barnes Fragrance Fair is full of under-the-radar independent brands with exciting scents, but it’s also bursting with enthusiastic consumers who are thrilled to be part of a growing fragrance community. They’re also keen to immerse themselves in the workshops, talks and even, thanks to Parfumdaze, the fragrance walks on offer. They don’t want to just buy, they want a memorable experience, fragrance isn’t like buying socks.
Launching Barnes Fragrance Fair in 2023, was a gamble. As a fragrance journalist, I knew the best of our British indies, who gamely agreed to help. We were pretty sure there were consumers out there who’d be interested, but, well, nothing’s ever certain.
The fair wasn’t even my idea, my friend Anne Mullins, herself a serial fair-starter, (Barnes Bookfest and now Bloody Barnes ) breezily said ‘Let’s give it a go’. Three years later, we are a hit, with thousands of attendees travelling from around the world to visit the 25 plus brands who stay robustly cheerful throughout a manic day of selling bottle after bottle of fragrance to an enamoured crowd.
And what glorious fragrances! From Nancy Meiland’s ethereally dreamy Lupin Meadow, to Olfactive O’s smoky, sexy Floral Smoke, via Jorum Studio’s extraordinary rhubarb smudge that’s Pony Boy, the thrilling range of style and innovation from around the UK was wonderfully overwhelming.
This year we sold 700 tickets to our talks and workshops, visitors travelled from around the world to hear Roja Dove give his legendary lecture on ingredients and attend perfumer Sarah McCartney’s Start Making Scent’s workshops, both of which sold out faster than we could keep up with.
The Guardian’s influential beauty editor Sali Hughes and presenter and fragrance writer Alice du Parcq got emotional about their favourite scents during Sali’s A Life In Scent talk and starstruck teenage boys queued up to get their fragrance bottles signed by panelist TJ Talks Scents. One young lad’s dad told us “It’s his Glastonbury, he’s been looking forward to it since Christmas’.
Then there was the welcome feeling of joy, a missing emotion in much of life currently, not just in fragrance retail. Brand founders who only talk to their consumers through social media suddenly found themselves fragrance celebrities, with smiling customers prepared to wait patiently just to ‘meet the maker’. Nick Steward, founder of Gallivant and Maya Njie, of Maya Njie are examples of brands we’ve seen grow to ‘established’ status over the three years since our launch, with the fan base to match.
Suzy Nightingale and Nicola Bonn have created such a supportive and inclusive community around their On The Scent podcast, we almost needed a break-out room for everyone to catch up, swap gifts and pay homage to their beloved hosts.
And we had a few real celebrity fragrance fans to add sparkle, the organisers group chat had a message from one volunteer saying (and younger readers may need to Google here ) “I’ve got Rita Tushingham and Rula Lenska looking for Hayley Mills. A sentence I can’t believe I’m texting.”
The Scented Letter editor Josephine Fairley, commented after her So You Think You Know Rose workshop, with LMR Naturals, that Barnes Fair was ‘The antithesis of AI and the absolute opposite of everything that’s been digitally de-humanised.’ Perhaps fragrance shines brighter when we’re all having an immersive in-person experience with it, rather than just selling it straight?
It’s not just UK consumer’s who feel like this. Over in Geelong, librarian and Paperback Perfume podcaster Clare Presser, launched the Geelong Fragrance Fair in March 2025, a first for Australia, partly because she recognised a similar growing enthusiasm for niche fragrance with Australian consumers and partly, she said, “Because I wanted to attend a fragrance fair and couldn’t afford the cost of going overseas”.
Australian artisan fragrance is growing at a similarly speedy rate to Europe, with artful brands such as Aysha Hansen, Hart + Hedi and the amusingly named Criminal Elements just the tip of a surf-wave of perfumers, bringing a bold passion and creativity to their scent profiles, often using lesser used, indigenous ingredients.
Presser said that since this year’s fair was the first one, everything was surprising, including its success but that the feeling of likeminded fragrance enthusiasts coming together drove the joy.
“The day was beautiful and absolutely wild” she told me, in one of our many ‘crazy fragrance fair founders’ support emails, sent late at night to each other. “People just loved being there, seeing people that they had not technically met before but we all chat online. We had people attend from overseas, there were groups that arrived in buses. It’s almost impossible to crystallize this down into individual moments, but I met people that have become close friends and the experience of being there has been a beacon in a pretty rough year in a global sense. It was a really loving day in a world that doesn’t always feel like that”
If all this seems like a charmingly idealistic approach to selling fragrance – Ostens co founder Chris Yu described Barnes Fair as being like a ‘Lovely country wedding, but with perfume and dogs’ – then the team behind Paris, Grasse and Shanghai Notes Perfume Weeks have quiet world domination on their agenda. Part events company, part magazine ( the wonderful Nez ) and part design consultancy, the team has created a platform for artisan fragrances that allows them to grow onto a global stage.
When I asked co-founder and commercial director Dominique Brunel if the assorted Perfume Weeks were for trade visitors or consumers, he said “Both, but does it matter?” Fair point. Having trudged around the Italian behemoths that are Esxence and Pitti Fragranze, the new fairs have a much more joyous and celebratory atmosphere, perhaps due to the planned inclusion of enthusiastically curious consumers rather than just industry insiders, who are of course, working the day job.
Brunel described Paris Perfume Week in March 2025, as ‘The year of confirmation’, that there is indeed, a tremendous market of interested consumers. The event, which is less about selling and more about scent discovery, had 4000 visitors, 60 exhibitors, including three major fragrance houses, an ingredients exhibition, 32 round-table SmellTalk masterclasses and 22 workshops, with plans for 2026 that include moving to the Palais Brongniart, a much bigger venue for an even greater impact.
There’s no doubt that the team want to shake up how artisan fragrance is viewed around the world, even bringing 25 Chinese brands to Paris Shanghai Perfume Week, to demonstrate that China has a thriving niche fragrance community with fascinating scent profiles and cultural reference points for storytelling – Yak Travelling Group from Dam Fool Perfumes, with its ‘hot yak in a cool forest’, spicy earthiness, remains a favourite for me.
Perhaps if we read between the lines, it is also attempting to regain some of the French authority in perfume that the country has arguably lost since the global rise of artisan perfumery. It turns out you don’t have to be French to make great perfume but Brunel’s Perfume Weeks are demonstrating that France is busy innovating the discovery experience, because today’s fragrance buyers want something different.
Over in Sweden, Saman Elyass runs Polaris Olfactive Week, a celebration of 50 independent and artisan fragrance houses held over two days in Stockholm. Now in its second year, Elyass offers an appreciation of ‘Slow Perfume’, where artisans makers create innovative and beautiful scents with sustainabilty, transparency and quality as the drivers.
“We look for brands that have ambitions in this area,” he told me, “Swedish consumers are really concerned about transparency and sustainabilty, they want to know where the ingredients come from and that they are harvested with care for the planet, when they come to Polaris they can ask the founders and see for themselves.” Elyass also hopes to get Swedish fragrance distillers to show the range of ingredients only grown in Sweden.
Along with talks and workshops, including The Smell of Space with perfumer Marina Barcenilla, founder of AromAtom, there’s a scented art exhibition by perfumer Maya Njie, herself half Swedish.
“The attendees love just hanging out”, Elyass continued,“ They think it’s super cool to be connected to the perfumers. It’s a very community driven event and we ask our attendees if we’re offering them what they want, to make sure they’re happy.’ Polaris hopes to double its attendance this year, to 1500 people, up from 820 last year.
Perhaps the connection to community is less surprising when considered alongside the bleak detachment that comes with a life lead increasingly on line. Loneliness figures are on the rise. The World Health Organisation’s recent global statistics** show that 17-21% of 13-29 year olds reported feeling lonely, with the highest rates among teenagers.
Barnes Fragrance Fairs is inclusive and fun, it’s hard not to make a friend when you’re standing next to them spritzing something delicious such as Angela Flanders’ (award winning ) Leather Rosa, with its sensuous ambery notes; it’s a conversation starter. At the Scent & Sound talk, hosted by podcaster Haydn Williams and Olympic Studios Records’ Roger Miles, attendees listened to songs the pair had matched to scents, stimulating memory, nostalgia and a lot of audience participation.
Recent Mintel*** figures claim 45% of under-45-year-olds now use fragrance to express themselves, so perhaps perfume is the new way for people to communicate. And judging by the many, surprisingly knowledgeable teenagers at Barnes Fair’s Men Smell! talk, they’re definitely using scent to find their tribes.
Fragrance Fairs are clearly filling a retail gap, but this may change, Boots has just premiered a fragrance store where independent brands are the highlight and fragrance boutiques such as Wild Iris and Soliflore in Brighton and Parfum Le Dance in Richmond offer great personal service and immersive workshops. The Pop Up Perfumery, a collaborative project between four indie brands, creates temporary retail spaces to take the brands closer to the customer.
With all this retail excitement, maybe fragrance fairs will not be needed in the future, although a glimpse at my inbox with emails asking when the next fair with be – May 16th 2026, if you’re asking – I think we may be here for a while yet. My feeling is that our events are joyful destinations and an IRL date for the diary that can be looked forward to with joy. We’re cheaper and easier to get into than an Oasis concert, and a day spent immersed in scent is one that -as we all know – brings joy and discovery without the need to scroll.
Our lovely illustrations are by Annie Mackin
Refs
*https://www.euromonitor.com/newsroom/press-releases/july-2025/fragrance-to-drive-23-of-beauty-growth-as-recession-glam-takes-hold
***https://www.mintel.com/insights/beauty-and-personal-care/make-sense-of-scents-current-and-future-fragrance-trends/
