The fragrance trend that has shoppers wanting to smell like ‘a little treat’

Bergamot, sandalwood and essence of … cow? Don’t laugh, dairy fragrances are now on trend.

Cold milk. Fig milk. Coconut milk. No, this isn’t my grocery list for the week. Those are the scent notes on the bottles of perfumes I saw on a recent visit to my local cosmetics counter.

There’s You Soie by Glossier, which combines rice milk and bergamot; Angel Blush by Mugler, with almond milk and sandalwood; and First Milk by the Nue Co., packaged in a vessel resembling a milk bottle.

At a time when young people are lining up for specialty coffees and matcha lattes, it’s little surprise that savvy brands want to get in on the hype. Across culture, milk does seem to be on the mind: tradwives are extolling raw milk, and whole milk is once again near the top of the food pyramid in the United States after the Trump administration released new dietary guidelines this year.

Some fragrance makers have tied these scents to feelings of nostalgia and comfort. The Nue Co. describes the milky note in its perfume as “our first scent memory – the soft embrace of early connection”.

But hold on: what does milk really smell like? Not a lot, unless it’s spoiled. That’s why most of these scents draw on different aroma compounds known as lactones to evoke ideas like “creamy” and “soft” that people may unconsciously associate with milk. Fragrance experts say these milky scents also involve a bit of branding sleight of hand.

“If you think about Abercrombie & Fitch’s ‘Fierce’, it was such a great and huge fragrance, but nobody talked about what was in it,” said Vicken Arslanian, a long-time fragrance distributor and the owner of Commodity, a perfume brand whose offerings include “Milk” and the recently released “Milk Orchid”.

Arslanian said he and his colleagues at Commodity stumbled on the scent almost by accident. The brand began with a “hot and cold” concept that had elements of warm marshmallow and toasted sesame: “When we smelled it, we saw an image of milk,” he recalled.

Customers weren’t always so inquisitive about scent notes, he said. A fragrance was once more of what he called a “closed creation”. The ingredients and layers that made a perfume smell as it did were largely indistinguishable to the untrained nose.

“Today, because people have now a deep interest in fragrance, the best way for us to connect to it and to speak about it is through language, and food is one of those main languages,” Arslanian said.

“I can relate to ‘matcha’ much better than I can relate to ‘Iso E Super,’ ” he added, referring to a synthetic aroma molecule.

With trends such as the “clean