let's talk about SCENTS 🌹🥸🫒

An interview with one of my favorite scent people, Tracy Wan, on the overlap of fragrance language, trends, and TikTok.

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The first scent I ever loved, that I was able to understand as “a scent,” was Curve by Liz Claiborne. I don’t remember my specific introduction, but I have two competing origin stories that I rest my first scent connection with.

One start was when I was a preteen in Kansas, only ten or so years old. My family lived in the state for a year, as my father was stationed there for a specific military training that could only happen in Fort Leavenworth. There wasn’t much to do off the military installation, save for hayrides and worrying about gangs. (There were no gangs. But it was the United States during the time of Dangerous Minds.) My one respite—which was my respite on every military post I lived on—was the Post Exchange, or the “PX” as armed forces families called it, a military-only answer to Wal-Mart unique to installations before such convenience-department stores were as pervasive as they are now, before Target and Amazon and Costco filled in every blank of desire in our heads. I would spend idle time wandering around the PX, looking at CDs and at toys and at beauty products. I loved colognes, not because I wore them but because of their sumptuous and interesting bottles. I was an aspiring artist (And emerging fag.) which meant I was drawn to the designer things. I remember the Curve bottle sticking out as being so playful, a squat neon green tonic that made you feel jazzy. The scent was peppery but light, the feminine and masculine shaping around each other. It made me feel like what I wasn’t: as if I was strong, as if I were manly, as if I was in a place that wasn’t largely fields. I don’t remember if I bought it for myself or if it was eventually gifted, but the coveting of this neon green bottle made it “my scent” for years and years. I wore it from tween times through college, until a friend of mine said that “every girl has an ex-boyfriend who wears Curve”: that killed it for me — but also sparked my journey of scent exploration, via Demeter fragrances and Clean Men. Then, in my senior year, my dear friend Mia introduced me to Diptyque’s Philosykos and I felt like something clicked. From there, I entered the world of Penhaligon’s and Serge Lutens and Nicolaï and, after I entered Scent Bar in LA in the early 2010s, I was cooked — and ended up amassing a collection of over forty bottles. A butterfly effect bound by a very clear curve.

The other origin of Curve and I was that my grandmother gave it to me, which I know to be true. One Christmas, she gave my brothers and I each a fragrance gift sets that were stacked in displays in every JCPenny across the country. A giant neon green tin, it had a large bottle of the fragrance along with a soap, shampoo, and lotion. I felt like a king with this bounty, using a spritz of this giant bottle every day and only allowing myself to use the body products for special occasions (holidays, school dances, etc.). While I know my grandmother didn’t introduce me to the scent because it was a good scent — it was a formality, something she had to get all the grandsons — I was the only one who “clicked” with it, who found an understanding of myself in the smell. What she did was hardwire a behavior, acknowledging that you can and should go all out with how you smell, that it’s possible to have a “signature” based in the nose: that was something she embodied, whether she intended to transfer that to me or not, as she always smelled of a sort of dusty jasmine, which is something I always associate with women of a certain age. One grandmother’s buying in bulk to get department store credit card credit is a young gay boy’s dream come true. The gift stuck with me and, long after the scents were gone, I used the giant Curve tin to hide valuables (tickets to movies, articles about the Spice Girls, love notes).

My relationship to scent has evolved and, as many of my friends and people who have met me in person know, it’s a deep part of my life and lore. I’m a Taurus. I embrace things like niche fragrances and irregular wines with abandon. I love my clothes more than I love myself on some days. I own more candles than I know people in Barcelona. My office chair is chartreuse velvet. If it’s something nice, if it can be devoured as a treat, I will indulge in it. I’ve never met a delicacy I didn’t like — especially when it comes to the sense of smell. I’m the type of person who, upon first encounter of something, puts my face in it for a smell. Not touch, not look: I smell it. I consider no greater compliment than being told “You smell nice.” (CREAM.) which is only made better by someone asking “What fragrance are you wearing?” (TRIPLE CREAM.).

This is hardly a singular practice, as scents and fragrances are a fact of human existence. From ancient Egyptians extracting oils from flowers to ancient Greeks and Arabs perfecting liquid perfumes, scents are less a trend and more a constant. What makes them interesting is that, while niche at points, it’s a genre of interest similar to music and food and art and fashion: it’s something we all engage with to varying degrees, our interest dipping in and out as it relates to our communities and lived lives, which popular culture can shape. There are obviously trends within the industry — from Vogue’s recent chat about “solar” scents to Dazed declaring “horse girl scents” in to Charlotte Tilbury’s launch of “emotion-boosting” scents — that currently lean less literal, more into vibes and the abstract, all of which is and isn’t marketing. This is all complicated by Sephora Kids and Niche Perfume Teen Boys, a phenomena that looks back to my own experience with fragrance, that this is a timeless pursuit despite childhood’s earlier and earlier end.

Like any trend, a lot of this is just chatter, of people yapping, of yapping turning to longing, of longing representing projections of our desired self via the nose. For me, I’m always trying to smell complicated, spicy, a bit funky, and like a long unfolding punch. This isn’t for you, the smeller, but for myself, so that I can be my own candle. Comme des Garçons Rogue does the trick (A fistful of beets!) as does Nasomatto’s Fantomas (Melon smashed on tin!). Like any object, there’s always more scents to be had, always more to want. So where did that land me? In the zones of fragrance conversations online and, if you’re a reader of this newsletter, you know where this is going: fragrance TikTok, or FragranceTok, a zone of niche fragrances and scent descriptions and over-eager personalities who want to tell you about their latest obsession. It’s cute! Results and tastes may vary but, for every type of scent person, there is someone on TikTok making content for you — and that is exactly how I met Tracy Wan.

Tracy is writer and scent sommelier (Obsessed. OBSESSED.) based in Toronto, Canada. Her TikTok, @invisiblestories, grabbed me for a few reasons: Tracy has a delicious way of describing scents, by going into extreme specifics, into personalizations that embody the elegance that I feel when I encounter a great smell and attempt to put it into words. She’s doing what I hope to be doing — but she’s doing it in such a singular, exciting fashion, explaining scents as “pissy” and “like endurance, like when you lift a really heavy weight” and “a moody Dutch still life…it’s got this hint of rottenness” and “that oily residue you get on your hands after petting a short-haired dog.” She advises to avoid single notes and think of scents as references, opting for abstract ideas instead of the literal. Also? Her French. Whenever any requiring of French comes up — Jean Claude Ellena, Ambre Narguilé, Baccarat Rouge — she zips through the words with the elegance of un renard. Her accent is an intoxicant similar to that of fragrances, which makes the experience of her videos even better.

She’s very cool! She’s one of the rare voices who can speak as credibly about deinfluencing as she can about the surprising beauty of Lush scents. She shares stellar morals while getting down with all the “fume heads” out there. After putting two and two together in the comments that we’re fans of each other’s work, I thought it would be great to chat with Tracy about scent, language, TikTok, and navigating something you love when you can’t always experience it sensually. Thus, the first of (what will be many) interviews on The Trend Report™ with someone who I consider to be one of leading voices in scents — and someone who has a great approach to understanding how scent trends are changing and how they should change. On this fourth day of Taurus season, treat your senses and enjoy a lil scented convo.

KRF: I "met" you on TikTok, following you for what feels like years, always leaving fawning comments about your work. How did you get into TikTok? What was the, say, "spark" that put you on track to become one of the best (IMO!!) "scent influencers" out there? 

TW: Ontario, Canada, where I live, went through one of the longest lockdown periods of the pandemic. I took to TikTok out of boredom, coupled with the fact that no one in my immediate social circle wanted to talk to me about one of the greatest passions of my life, scent. So I started speaking into the void, and eventually people started tuning in.