By Julia Press
October 22, 2025
As demand for products scented like vanilla, pistachio and other edible indulgences soars, some GLP-1 users say there’s a link to their changed eating habits.
Amy Ebell’s perfume-trend TikTok videos consistently drew thousands of views after she started posting under the handle @AmyNoseScents in late 2024. But one video in July generated some of the heaviest engagement the Australian content creator had ever seen.
In it, Ebell outlined a provocative theory connecting the recent popularity of perfumes scented like vanilla, espresso and other edible indulgences to the global rise of GLP-1s. “Whenever society doubles down on being thin, dessert-scented perfumes spike,” she says in the video, also citing the writer Virgie Tovar, who’s written on the topic. “You’re still reaching for the sugar, just in a way that your body can actually consume.”
Ebell’s video has drawn more than 700,000 views and 1,300 comments, many of them vouching for the hypothesis. “I’m on that medication and YES, I joke that a spray of my fave foodie fragrance is my breakfast,” one person wrote. Another said: “I’ve been on Mounjaro since March 2025 and every single fragrance I’ve bought since then is gourmand,” using the perfume industry’s term for decadent, often sweet-smelling scents. “She is right!”
Scientifically speaking, the jury is still out on the link between appetite-suppressing medications and an olfactory preference for sweets. But the growing market for gourmand perfumes is undeniable. Of all the fragrances introduced globally in 2024, 22% were classified as “gourmand” by market research firm Mintel Group Ltd., up from 19% in 2023 and 15% in 2022. From July 2024 to July 2025, queries for “gourmand fragrance” and similar search terms grew 186% on TikTok and 82% on Google, according to Spate, an artificial-intelligence-powered consumer trend forecaster. And of the top 10 bestselling fragrances on TikTok Shop in the first eight months of 2025, almost every scent featured gourmand notes such as caramel-vanilla or strawberry-marshmallow, according to Charm.io, a firm that tracks e-commerce sales.
“I’m not even calling it a trend anymore,” says Arnaud Guggenbuhl, global head of fine fragrance marketing at Givaudan, a Swiss fragrance developer that works with brands such as Lancôme, Diptyque and Tom Ford. “I’m calling it a wave.”
Of course, gourmand fragrances have been around about as long as mass-produced perfumes and maybe longer. Perfume historian Jessica Murphy considers the genesis of the category to be the development of a synthesized vanilla scent in a German lab in the 1870s. But for most of the 20th century, floral, grassy and spicy scents cycled through phases of popularity.
Then in 1992 came Angel from French fashion designer Thierry Mugler, a fragrance combining notes of patchouli, red fruits and vanilla. “It was a shocking perfume. No one had smelled anything like it before,” Murphy says. Copycats followed, and by the early 2000s, gourmand scents saturated the shelves of high-end department stores as well as mall retailers such as Bath & Body Works, with its popular Warm Vanilla Sugar line. Eventually the trend faded, with woody, musky fragrances such as Le Labo’s Santal 33 and Dior Sauvage dominating sales in the 2010s.
But the explosion of “PerfumeTok”—the corner of TikTok devoted to fragrance reviews, unboxing scent videos and the like—during the Covid-19 pandemic helped bring gourmands wafting back. Dessertlike scents were an easy entry point into the fragrance world for people learning about perfumes online before they had a chance to actually smell them, says Ebell, the content creator. “If you read the notes and the notes are cherry, vanilla, chocolate, you know what that’s going to smell like,” she says. “But vetiver? Birch tar?”
High-end gourmands that took off during the pandemic are still going strong, including Italian perfumer Giardini di Toscana’s Bianco Latte, which retails for $160 for 100 milliliters and has notes of vanilla, milk and honey. Even brands such as Brooklyn, New York-based perfumer D.S. & Durga, which helped popularize the earthy scents of the 2010s, have leaned into gourmands: Pistachio, with its namesake scent, costs $300 for a 100ml bottle. It was one of its most successful launches to date in 2021, and it continues to be a top seller. Ebell’s gourmand of choice is Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21 by Guerlain. A 50ml bottle retails for $645 in the US, but she says she pays almost $800 to get it delivered to her home in Western Australia.
Gourmands are also available at lower price points. On TikTok Shop, this year’s top-selling fragrance brand is the Dubai-based Lattafa, which brought in more than $33 million from January to September, according to Charm.io. One of Lattafa’s most popular scents is called Eclaire, which retails for $45 for 100ml. “We have more demand than we can actually produce,” says Monty Singh, head of US operations. It’s also possible to get into the trend via body products from mass-market brands: A collection of Dunkin Donuts-inspired shampoos and deodorants from Native and a Crumbl cookie-scented line of lathers and lotions from Dove have been some of the top-selling fragranced products introduced so far in 2025, according to market research firm Circana.
Larissa Jensen, Circana’s industry adviser for beauty, describes the change in perfume habits that occurred during the pandemic as a shift “from ‘fragrance for others’ to ‘fragrance for me.’” During the early days of the pandemic, Circana tracked an increase in sales of beachy scents such as coconut, signaling a desire among consumers to transport themselves somewhere they couldn’t actually be, Jensen says. She thinks a similar phenomenon is driving GLP-1 users toward gourmands today: “I may not be able to have a doughnut, but I can smell it on my hair and be surrounded by the scent.”
Valentina Parma, a researcher at the Monell Chemical Sciences Center in Philadelphia who studies olfaction in different clinical populations, says scientists are just starting to study the possible effects of GLP-1s on users’ sense of smell. The early research does suggest there may be a link between the drugs and distorted olfaction—that is, things seeming to smell differently than they used to. In a paper under academic review, Parma’s team analyzed almost two decades’ worth of side effects reported to the US Food and Drug Administration by GLP-1 users and found that a statistically significant portion said they experienced changes in smell.
Why this distortion may be happening isn’t clear yet. But for people who’ve lost the sensory pleasure they used to derive from food, the role of smell could take on increased importance, Parma says. “Olfactory memories are very strong. They’re immediate. They’re emotionally intense,” she says. “There’s a world where those associations could be enough to satisfy a desire for an experience that used to be food-related. But this is speculation rather than evidence-based.”
Still, that has been the self-reported experience of a number of TikTok users. James Newburrie, who posts about fragrances on TikTok under the handle @jamessmellsgood, says that he’s always worn some gourmands (including Mugler’s Angel Men, which smells like patchouli and coffee) but that he generally gravitated toward more herbal, fresh fragrances. Since starting GLP-1s in 2024 and losing more than 130 pounds, however, he now prefers vanilla aromas. “I’m using perfumes to manage my mood and my emotion the way I used to use food,” he says.
Not everyone’s sure the connection is so straightforward. Murphy, the perfume historian, says she thinks the world is in the middle of a natural consumer cycle that churns between gourmands and other scents; soon enough, she predicts, consumers will tire of smelling sweet. And Givaudan’s Guggenbuhl notes that gourmand scents have a lot in common with other TikTok-fueled trends in that they’re comforting and indulgent—the same qualities that drive some shoppers to decadent candy and fuzzy fad dolls. Gourmands, Guggenbuhl says, are “like an olfactory Labubu.”