A growing hunger for scents good enough to eat 

While we’d all love to start each day with a bowl of vanilla ice cream, that’s frustratingly not recommended by most physicians. 

But, as always, consumerism has found a loophole: Fragrances that smell like indulgent treats. 

Gourmand scents, as they’re known, aren’t new — a synthesized vanilla scent was created in a German lab in the 1870s — but they’re trending in a big way. 

And one of the possible drivers behind the trend is the growing popularity of GLP-1 medications. 

Makes scents 

While medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro suppress users’ appetites, they could potentially increase one’s desire to smell something decadent. 

Both industries are growing: 

• One in eight American adults say they’ve taken a GLP-1 medication and households with at least one GLP-1 user cut grocery spending by ~6%.
• Meanwhile, demand for gourmand fragrances has exploded. Out of all fragrances launched in 2024, 24% were gourmand, according to market research firm Mintel.
• Searches for “gourmand fragrance” and similar queries spiked 82% on Google and 186% on TikTok year over year in July 2025, per Spate.

It’s all part of a larger boom: The fragrance market is estimated to generate ~$62B in 2025. 

Smells like teen spirit 

Per usual, it’s the youngest customers driving the trend with their spending power.

And they’re doing so on “PerfumeTok,” where influencers unbox and review perfumes: 

• On TikTok Shop, most of the top 10 bestselling fragrances in the first eight months of 2025 were gourmand scents.
• The top-selling fragrance brand, Dubai-based Lattafa, sells a scent called Eclaire and earned $33m in revenue between January and September 2025.

It’s not just perfume — young consumers are reimagining what “clean” smells like, and they want nearly everything in their homes to be scented. 

And we mean everything, from birthday-cake-scented trash bags to laundry detergent that smells like juicy peaches. 

It could all be part of the “little treat culture,” where consumers yearn for tasty (in this case, smelly) little pleasures to bring lightness to their days. 

Does this sweet trend make you nauseous? You can opt to smell like a robot, instead.