I have been attending Pitti Fragranze since 2017, which means I have had the chance to watch the exhibition — and independent perfumery along with it — evolve almost in real time, rather than through press releases.
For me, exhibitions like Pitti have always mattered in several professional capacities. I write about perfume as a journalist for various publications and work as a content creator, but there is another side to what I do. Even before my first Pitti, I founded Europe’s first perfume club and began organising fragrance events and gatherings.
In that part of my work, professional exhibitions have proved just as important as they are in journalism. They are places not only to smell upcoming launches, but to meet the people behind them, hear ideas directly from their creators, find future guests for events, and decide which of the hundreds of new releases deserve a life beyond the exhibition floor. Ultimately, much of my work is about exactly that: turning what happens within the industry into a living experience for people.
Over eight years, that experience has changed considerably. Pitti has changed. But what has changed even more is what we mean when we talk about niche perfumery.
Credits: Pitti Fragranze 2025.
When niche stopped being small
The figures from Pitti Fragranze 2025 give a good indication of the scale of that change. Stazione Leopolda hosted 258 brands, around 75% of them from outside Italy. Of those exhibitors, 110 were either new to Pitti or returning names. Almost 2,200 buyers and industry professionals attended over the three days — a 32% increase on the previous year.
For a market that continues to define itself with words such as niche, artistic and independent, these are decidedly non-niche numbers.
And this is about more than the size of one exhibition. The mechanics of launching a perfume brand have changed dramatically over the past few years. Production, international distribution, social media and direct access to consumers have lowered many of the barriers that once made entering the market difficult. At the same time, niche perfumery has stopped being a small alternative to the mainstream and has become a substantial industry in its own right — complete with bestsellers, fashions, commercial formulas and trends that can be replicated almost instantly.
This creates a curious paradox. Technically, creating a new perfume brand is easier than ever. Making sure anyone remembers it among several hundred beautiful bottles, persuasive founders and meticulously constructed concepts is considerably harder.
The scarcest commodity in contemporary niche perfumery is no longer product. It is attention.
Which is why, at Pitti, I find myself increasingly interested not only in what smells fashionable, but in how brands attempt to become recognisable in the first place.
Vanilla, milk, pistachio — what comes next?
Naturally, an exhibition does not exist separately from the market. All the major tendencies of recent years were present.
Gourmands are going nowhere: milky accords, pistachio, chocolate, vanilla, cherry and sweet fruit compositions were everywhere. Maison Tahité continues its almost encyclopaedic exploration of edible materials, Salum Parfums presented White Chocolate, and countless new releases once again demonstrated that the public appetite for perfumes one might simultaneously want to wear and eat with a spoon remains remarkably healthy.
But if the gourmand boom initially felt like a reaction against the heavy woody-amber constructions of the preceding period, it has now become a commercial code in its own right. A successful idea is rapidly reproduced across dozens of independent brands: vanilla gives way to cherry, cherry to pistachio, followed by milk, chocolate and the next dessert.
And this is where things become more interesting. When everyone is speaking the same language, individuality is no longer determined by the note itself, but by the accent.
The best new gourmands therefore try to escape literalness. Sweetness becomes salty, smoky, mineral or bodily; a familiar comfort scent acquires some friction. Lü Bu by Sora Dora revolves around the idea of burning Armenian paper. BeauFort London’s Sirenide picks up the fashionable nutty theme, but filters it through such a recognisably dark house aesthetic that the trend ceases to be the protagonist.
Perhaps this is what separates an interesting brand from one that is merely timely: not the ability to spot a trend, but the ability to digest it until what comes out the other side sounds like you again.
Against that background, Hiram Green’s ULTRA felt particularly conspicuous — a huge, vivid floral centred on narcissus and inspired by the aesthetics of the 1980s. When so much around it is edible, soft and comforting, uncompromising florality begins to feel almost countercultural.
Storytelling: when smelling good is no longer enough
Competition for attention has an obvious consequence. Contemporary niche brands increasingly sell more than perfume. They construct entire worlds around it.
Names, visual language, packaging, exhibition stands, founder stories, cultural references, music, cinema and art have all become part of the product, almost alongside the formula itself.
At Pitti 2025 this was particularly apparent. Thomas de Monaco presented Flowers of the Future, a collection of imaginary flowers from the future in which the narrative genuinely extends the olfactory idea. At the opposite pole was Kateryna Vel'menko with her motto, “No stories to tell… Only perfumes to love” — which is, of course, already a rather excellent piece of storytelling.
And yet Vel'menko also provided one of the most convincing examples of what storytelling may be becoming. At her stand, Not a Morning Person was experienced alongside real Persian black tea with saffron and rosewater. The story was not told — it was poured into a glass.
This is not simply marketing triumphing over perfumery. In an oversaturated market, a story serves another purpose: it gives a fragrance somewhere to live in our memory. We may forget twenty perfectly competent woody-amber compositions; it is much harder to forget the one we once drank with Persian tea.
So the question is no longer whether perfumery needs storytelling. Clearly, it does. The more interesting question is: does the story expand the fragrance, or is it trying to compensate for what the fragrance lacks?
More interesting still is the next step: multisensory experience. Storytelling explains or frames a fragrance; a multisensory approach allows the same idea to be experienced through several channels at once — scent, music, imagery, space and, in Vel'menko’s case, taste. Crucially, it does not necessarily tell us what we are supposed to feel.
Perhaps this is the more interesting future for perfume storytelling: not telling people what they ought to imagine, but giving them another way into the fragrance. Taste, music, imagery and space can continue a composition where words end.
SPRING: the new among the new
This is one reason why SPRING has become one of the most interesting areas of Pitti for me: a curated space for new names and projects only beginning to reach an international professional audience.
The very existence of SPRING is revealing. The market now produces so many new brands that discovery itself requires navigation. It is no longer enough to gather niche perfumery under one roof; within niche, someone has to curate the new among the new.
In 2025, four names in particular stayed with me: AVII, Hellenist, Organ Tale Parfums and Synesthésie.
Spanish brand AVII seems almost deliberately resistant to marketing noise: minimalist aesthetics, the principle “Signature, not a Statement”, openly credited perfumers and a refusal to bury the fragrances beneath elaborate fantasies telling consumers what they are supposed to feel.
What I remember most, however, is Yūgen, composed by Céline Guivarc’h — an extraordinarily beautiful tuberose floating in pear sorbet. The tuberose is white, fleshy, almost tropical, but instead of its familiar creamy languor, it has been plunged into icy pear flesh. The flower seems covered in frost: pear juice running over the petals, the edges almost crunching with cold, all the usual voluptuousness of tuberose suddenly transparent and nearly weightless.
The most interesting part came after Pitti. Yūgen travelled home with me and into my fragrance events, where, time after time, it became one of the most memorable Pitti highlights for the audience. For me, that may be the best test of an exhibition discovery: when a fragrance survives the journey from the professional bubble into a room full of completely different people.
Hellenist works very differently, constructing an elaborate cultural territory around Greece and its history. At Pitti, the brand presented La Nuit des 300, for which founder Jean-David Jacoby invited Maurice Roucel to work with one of the perfumer’s signature materials: musk.
Korean brand Organ Tale is interesting for another reason. The appearance of brands like this demonstrates just how far the geography of contemporary niche perfumery has expanded. A young Asian house can immediately work with perfumers of the calibre of Bertrand Duchaufour and Quentin Bisch. Artistic perfumery no longer travels exclusively from a handful of traditional European centres towards the rest of the world: ideas, capital, aesthetics and perfumers themselves now move between countries in every direction.
Florentine Synesthésie, meanwhile, may have been the most literal embodiment of the multisensory idea itself. Even the names of its first five fragrances — Blow, Mother’s Instinct, Step Into Liquid, Strange Days and Substance — speak the language of cinema, while Pitti brought another addition: Call Me by Your Name.
I particularly remember Strange Days and Step Into Liquid. The first is a dark Tokyo frame: cypress, incense smoke, cinnamon, resins, rose and jasmine. Not postcard Tokyo with neon and cherry blossom, but the city after midnight — wet wood, warm smoke escaping through a temple door, and flowers that have clearly been assigned a dramatic role in the scene.
Step Into Liquid is entirely different: orris butter, gardenia and yellow fruits float over pepper, cinnamon and a strange alcoholic coolness. The fragrance seems constantly to change its physical state — powder, then liquid, then the cold air hovering above it.
Here, the concept of Synesthésie works precisely because it does not exist separately from the perfumes. Cinema has not been attached to the bottle as an attractive biography; it simply offers another way to read the composition.
A new generation — and one very experienced newcomer
Among the other discoveries of Pitti 2025, SANYA deserves attention: a very young brand launched at the end of 2024. Its fragrances are composed by Rosalie Moulet, who was only 25 at the time of the exhibition. The collection draws on the founder’s personal geography and memories, connecting Istanbul, Cyprus and Pakistan.
This, too, represents an important shift. A generation is entering the industry that grew up in a world where niche perfumery was already an established category. For them, Serge Lutens, L'Artisan Parfumeur or Comme des Garçons are no longer a revolution; they are part of the history of the profession. A young brand now has to find its own language within a territory that previous generations have already repeatedly declared “alternative”.
The almost comic counterpoint is L'Entropiste, one of the most discussed new brands at the exhibition. The “newcomer” in this case is Bertrand Duchaufour, who needed roughly forty years of creating perfumes for other houses before finally launching one of his own.
His idea of entropy — deliberately disturbing equilibrium in order to find a new harmony — feels particularly apt now. The maturity of the niche industry has created two apparently opposite possibilities: a 25-year-old perfumer can enter a world in which niche has always existed, while one of the people who helped shape its modern language can decide to start again under his own name.
Somewhere between those two points lies contemporary artistic perfumery.
Why still come?
Today, almost everything one can formally “learn” at a perfume exhibition can be obtained without leaving home. Press releases arrive by email. Samples arrive by courier. A founder can tell their story on Instagram, and a new perfume sometimes appears in an online database before it reaches a shop counter.
But exhibitions are not really about obtaining information.
They provide context.
When 258 brands are standing next to one another, you begin to see which ideas are appearing simultaneously in different countries. After the tenth milky fragrance, milk stops being a coincidence. After the fifth brand with a meticulously constructed visual universe, storytelling stops being an individual characteristic and becomes a characteristic of the market itself. Conversely, one enormous tuberose, one strange young brand or one quiet stand can unexpectedly tell you more about the industry than ten loudly promoted launches.
That is probably why, after all these years, I continue to return to Pitti. Not simply for a list of launches, but for the chance to see the whole picture at once: established houses and debutants, commercial trends and the people resisting them, new geographies and new generations of perfumers.
Niche has become big. So big, in fact, that the word niche itself is increasingly inadequate to explain what these hundreds of very different projects still have in common.
Perhaps the more useful question today is this: has independence stopped being a market category and become, instead, the ability to preserve an individual voice within that market?
As long as, among hundreds of bottles, there are still those few that make you stop, meet the person on the other side of the stand and ask one more question, exhibitions like Pitti still have a purpose.
And, as always, I write in more detail about individual fragrances, trends, new brands and my personal discoveries from Pitti Fragranze on my Instagram.