Perhaps the answer has less to do with how many people wear a fragrance than with why that fragrance was created — and what happens when we encounter it.
I used to wear a fragrance that felt relatively uncommon.
Then, one day, I recognised it on someone else. Not long afterwards, I smelled it again on another person.
The reaction surprised me.
There was nothing wrong with the fragrance. It smelled exactly as it had before. I still liked it. But something about my relationship with it had changed.
What had once felt personal suddenly felt familiar.
It made me question something I had previously taken almost for granted:
What does “niche” actually mean?
Is a fragrance niche because relatively few people know it? Because it comes from an independent house? Because it is difficult to find? Because of its price?
And if a fragrance becomes successful enough that we begin smelling it regularly around us, does it somehow become less niche?
At first, my answer would probably have been yes.
I am no longer convinced that it is that simple.
Niche is a market category. Artistic intent is something else.
The word niche has become extraordinarily broad.
It can describe a small independent perfume house producing fragrances in relatively limited quantities. But it is also used for internationally recognised fragrance houses with extensive distribution, substantial commercial operations and global audiences.
None of these structures tells us, by itself, what the perfume will be like.
Commercial success does not make a fragrance less sophisticated, less individual or less capable of creating an emotional response. Equally, obscurity does not automatically make a perfume artistically interesting.
Perhaps rarity is therefore the wrong place to draw the line.
What interests us more at Sillage Dépôt is intention — and whether that intention has found its way into the fragrance itself.
When an idea becomes something we can feel
For us, artistic perfumery often begins with something a creator wants to explore.
An emotion.
A place.
A story.
A memory.
A material.
An obsession.
The fragrance becomes the medium through which that idea is interpreted.
But the existence of a concept is not enough.
Contemporary fragrance is rich in storytelling. Almost any perfume can be surrounded by an evocative narrative.
What interests us is whether the original idea appears to have shaped the composition itself: its materials, contrasts, textures, structure or development.
In other words:
Does something of the idea remain when the words surrounding the perfume disappear?
That connection does not have to be literal.
A fragrance inspired by a forest does not need to reproduce the smell of trees. It might explore darkness, dampness, resin, smoke, mineral coldness or the sensation of standing beneath a canopy.
The subject provides the starting point.
The perfume provides the interpretation.
And then there is the person smelling it.
The Wearer Completes Part of the Experience
A creator can establish an intention, but cannot completely determine how a fragrance will be experienced.
Perfume passes through another person's memories, associations and preferences.
A fragrance can comfort us. It can make us curious, nostalgic or unsettled. It can remind us of somewhere we have been — or somehow create the impression of somewhere we have never been at all.
But there is no guarantee that two people will respond in the same way.
Sometimes the reaction is immediate. Sometimes it takes several wearings before we understand why a fragrance keeps drawing us back.
And sometimes we simply dislike it.
That does not necessarily tell us that the composition has failed.
An artistic intention does not require a universal response. A fragrance that produces a strong reaction in one person may leave someone else completely unmoved.
For us, that space between the creator's intention and the wearer's interpretation is part of what makes perfume interesting.
The idea behind the scent
This is one reason we find a house such as Stora Skuggan so interesting.
Take Silphium.
Its starting point is something we cannot actually experience: silphium, a plant famous in the ancient Mediterranean world and particularly associated with the Greek colony of Cyrene in present-day Libya.
Ancient accounts suggest that silphium was highly valued, while the exact identity of the plant and the reasons for its disappearance remain subjects of historical and botanical discussion.
Most importantly for the perfume, we cannot know exactly what the ancient plant smelled like.
There is no original against which the fragrance can be tested.
What remains is interpretation: an attempt to give contemporary olfactory form to something absent.
That changes the question we can ask of the perfume.
We are not simply asking whether Silphium smells pleasant or whether it accurately reproduces a plant from antiquity.
It cannot provide that kind of reconstruction.
Instead, we encounter someone else's interpretation of an idea.
The concept becomes a creative constraint: something from which decisions about materials, atmosphere and composition can emerge.
Then we decide what — if anything — that interpretation makes us feel.
You may love it.
You may find it strange.
Someone else may smell the same composition and experience something entirely different.
That subjectivity is not a weakness in the experience.
It is part of it.
But does a perfume need an elaborate concept like this to be artistic?
Of course not.
Expression and consensus are not opposites
Conceptual does not necessarily mean inaccessible.
Commercial does not necessarily mean uncreative.
Accessible does not mean conventional.
The boundaries are not that clean.
It would be easy to turn the discussion into a choice between artistic purity on one side and commercial perfumery on the other. In practice, creativity and commerce continually overlap.
Perhaps a more interesting axis is expression and consensus.
At one end, a fragrance might begin primarily with something its creators want to express or investigate.
At another, development might place greater emphasis on an established consumer preference, recognisable olfactory territory or broad accessibility.
But these are not mutually exclusive positions.
A fragrance can communicate a distinctive creative idea and still attract a large audience. Likewise, a perfume can be rare, independently produced and unconventional in presentation without necessarily establishing an individual olfactory point of view.
Most perfumery exists somewhere between those positions.
Expression, beauty, accessibility, ambition and commerce continually interact.
That grey area matters because commercial success does not automatically erase the intention that produced a fragrance.
What Happens When an Artistic Perfume Becomes Successful?
Imagine that an independent fragrance house becomes enormously successful.
Distribution expands. Its bottles appear in more cities. A perfume once encountered mainly through specialist stores becomes widely recognisable.
Eventually, you begin smelling it on other people.
What has actually changed?
Its rarity has changed.
Its cultural context may have changed.
The associations surrounding it may have changed.
And your own relationship with it may change as a result.
But the creative decisions already contained in the composition have not retrospectively disappeared.
The idea that initiated the perfume is still there.
Whether it continues to interest us is another question.
That distinction brings me back to the fragrance I began recognising on other people.
Perhaps the perfume had not changed at all.
Perhaps what changed was what I expected niche to mean.
I had associated niche with rarity: with discovering something that felt personal partly because relatively few other people seemed to know it.
There is nothing wrong with wanting that.
Fragrance participates in how we present ourselves, and discovering an unfamiliar perfume can make wearing it feel particularly personal.
But rarity, independence, artistic intention, emotional response and commercial success describe different things.
A perfume can be rare without affecting us.
It can become successful without losing the idea that originally shaped it.
And a fragrance experienced by thousands of people can still create an intensely personal association for one wearer.
Perhaps “Is It Niche?” Is the Wrong Question
This is why we are becoming less interested in deciding whether a perfume is truly niche.
The category can tell us something about positioning, history or distribution.
It cannot tell us everything about the fragrance.
For us, more interesting questions begin elsewhere.
Why does this perfume exist?
What was someone trying to explore?
Has that intention shaped what we actually smell, or does it exist mainly in the story surrounding the bottle?
Does the composition offer a perspective of its own?
And what happens when we encounter it?
Does it make us curious?
Comfort us?
Unsettle us?
Transport us somewhere?
Change the way we perceive a familiar material?
Make us remember?
Or simply make us want to smell it again?
There does not have to be a correct response.
There only has to be a response that belongs to us.
Perhaps that is where artistic perfumery becomes most interesting: somewhere between the intention of the person who created the fragrance and the experience of the person who wears it.