Spring is in full bloom, and with it comes a fresh wave of fragrance conversations, pushing new ways to think about scent. At Paris Perfume Week this April, one talk in particular stood out: Décoder la Gen Z: quête de sens, quête de scents (Decoding Gen Z: search for meaning, search for scents), which brought together Éric Briones, strategic planner and author of Luxe Renaissance; Véronique Ferval, Senior Vice President of Global Fragrance Design at L’Oréal Groupe; and Alicia Restino, International Marketing Director for YSL Beauté Fragrances at L’Oréal Groupe to talk about how this generation is reshaping the way we think about scent.
For Gen Z, fragrance isn’t simply about choosing your signature scent; it’s a form of self-expression that is deeply tied to the freedom to transform yourself. According to the panel, they’re building a more immersive relationship with fragrance, which is what many of us really want at the end of the day.
How Gen Z Built a New Scent Ritual Post-Covid
Cliché but true: sometimes it takes the threat of losing something to make you appreciate it. As L’Oréal Groupe’s Véronique Ferval noted during the talk, Covid became a turning point in the way many people related to fragrance. The fear of losing our sense of smell made scent feel more precious, pushing people to sharpen their noses and build more intentional rituals around perfume. This can be done a number of ways: travel memories (an editor once told me to travel with one perfume; that way, I’d always associate it with that time and place), fragrance layering, or weaving fragrance into everyday life at home.
She points out how Gen Z may be the first generation to enter fragrance already deeply versed in it. “Gen Z is the first generation to be truly cultured and sophisticated when it comes to perfume, and that started digitally, of course. Through TikTok and social media, they’ve had unprecedented access to perfumers, ingredients, and fragrance knowledge, with few limits to what they can discover. This generation is developing a new language around scent, one that’s more cinematic, more visual. Also one that’s more open to mixing high and low brands,” she says.
Why One Signature Scent Isn’t Enough Anymore
One of the clearest takeaways from the conversation was that Gen Z no longer sees perfume as a single lifelong signature. Instead, fragrance is becoming something more fluid and situational. It is a way to step into a different version of yourself, depending on your mood for the day.
This idea came through in what Éric Briones described as “olfactory mooding,” a concept that frames fragrance less as something you simply wear and more as a tool you actively use. Rather than committing to one fixed identity, Gen Z seems drawn to scent as a tool for adaptation and self-expression. One fragrance can feel clean and minimal, another nostalgic, another bold. The point isn’t to smell the same every day–it’s to have options.
Thinking about this helps explain why Gen Z’s relationship to fragrance feels so emotionally charged. If previous generations treated fragrance like a signature, this generation is treating it more like a language used to speak to and be seen by other individuals. It is complex, something to layer and personalize. The result is a more expansive view of perfume: not just as luxury, but as ritual and self-expression.
