Quarantine has pushed people to do some interesting things. For example, wearing perfume at home. While it might seem a little strange to wear your favorite fragrance, people have been doing it to regain some semblance of normalcy in their day-to-day lives.
After my scented candle obsession, one of my favorite quarantine discoveries has been perfume TikTok. If you’re unfamiliar with the platform, TikTok has been a source of entertainment and inspiration for all sorts of things, like cooking, home decorating and now—scents.
Fragrance TikTok (or FragranceTok) is a treasure trove of information for people who take scents seriously. Aside from frequently asked perfume questions (Like “Is Chanel No. 5 really the best perfume ever?” and “Why is perfume so expensive?”), FragranceTok reviews perfumes and helps people find their signature scents.
Scent, emotion and memory
Personally, I wasn’t much into perfume before I discovered FragranceTok. I’ve used the same hand-me-down perfume my mom gave me when I was in my teens, but discovering this TikTok genre was a game-changer.
Scent is tied to emotion and memory. It’s a particularly memory-triggering sense, right up there along with taste. Getting a whiff of a particular scent—like your lola’s old perfume—immediately transports you to a different place and time, unlocking memories you haven’t thought about in years.
Aside from unlocking old memories, scents also have the power to give you something to look forward to. My favorite FragranceTok subgenre is finding the right scent for specific occasions. As things stand right now, going out is dangerous and getting your fragrance noticed is impossible with the mask mandate in place.
Finding specific scent recommendations for the future has given me something to look forward to. It’s a fun hobby and helps stir my imagination for whatever the future has in store for me. While people might argue that it’s expensive and useless, I would say that other hobbies can be just as expensive and it makes me happy.
After all, surviving quarantine (beyond the physical sense) is all about taking whatever brings you joy and running with it as fast as you can.
