Eating With Our Noses: On Gourmand Perfumes, Diet Culture & the Danger of Smelling Sweet
This week, we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of Highsnobiety Beauty. For a year now, we’ve platformed stories about everything from Gen Z’s plastic surgery paradigm to perfume’s emotional power. “Beauty” is so much more than an aesthetic standard or the products we use — it’s culture, politics, and personal style. Over the next three days, we’re rolling out a special series that captures beauty’s many faces.
The first perfume I ever bought smelled like gummy bears. It was a finishing touch fit for a seven-year-old’s saccharine beauty routine: I washed my hair with strawberry-scented shampoo, slathered my lips in watermelon Lip Smackers, and smeared my shoulders with Bath & Body Works blueberry body glitter. I was a walking fruit tart, served with a side of Haribo.
The year was 2002. Soon, Jessica Simpson would launch Dessert Beauty, a cosmetic line that included a cupcake perfume packaged with a frosted, sprinkled cap. Britney Spears followed with Fantasy in 2005, a sickeningly sweet lychee, caramel, and chocolate soup. Paris Hilton’s Heiress (2006) was a sticky peach and passionfruit purée. Smelling like a sweet treat was en vogue. It was an era in which the beauty industry, it seemed, was riding high on the adage “Sugar, spice, and everything nice; that’s what girls are made of.”
Eventually, edible, dessert-like fragrances — also known as gourmands — would fall out of favor, replaced by understated, “sophisticated” perfumes such as Byredo’s Blanche, in 2009, and Le Labo’s Santal 33, in 2011. But as the 20-year trend cycle would have it, gourmands are back. According to consumer trends platform Spate, Google searches for “gourmand scents” increased 36.8 percent between 2022 and 2023. And since 2022, perfumes with vanilla, coconut, honey, and strawberry notes have driven the most significant positive change in average monthly Google searches. Instead of Y2K staples like Juice Bar’s Gummi Bears body spray and Jessica Simpson’s Cupcake, we’re dousing ourselves in Parfums de Marly’s Althaïr (vanilla and bourbon), Snif’s Crumb Couture (croissant), and Kayali’s Yum Pistachio Gelato (self-explanatory).
During the first wave of gourmand mania, I was too young to read much into the trend. It was fun — I could eat my cookies and ice cream and smell like them, too. Now a 28-year-old slowly unlearning the disordered eating habits I picked up in my teens, I recognize the double-bind of smelling like dessert. The term “gourmand,” typically used to describe a person who enjoys eating (and perhaps eats too much), is now hitched to a beauty trend that doesn’t involve eating at all. Instead of cluing us into the joy of biting into a flaky croissant, gourmands divorce the smell of delicious food from the act of eating it. It stands to reason that a product like this reinforces the belief that hunger can be “cheated.”
Food-scented fragrances seem to enter, and re-enter, the zeitgeist at the very moments culture clings to the thin ideal. In the early 2000s, as we were slowly shrugging off the “heroin chic” aesthetic, it was tabloids scrutinizing the weight of young, female celebrities like Spears and Nicole Richie; Bridget Jones’s Diary telling us that an 130-pound, five-foot-five Renée Zellweger was “fat”; and juice cleanses repackaging extreme calorie restriction as “detoxing.
The reemergence of the body positivity movement circa 2012 offered a brief reprieve from the toxicity of early-2000s diet culture. But now it seems we’re right back where we started, thanks to myriad “advances” seen in the intervening years: Plastic surgeons are carving the buccal fat out of our faces; Ozempic and its celebrity devotees are turning drug-induced weight loss into a status symbol; and “body checks” — videos that zero in on a creator’s figure — are flooding TikTok.
Hannah Nelson[Gourmands] give me the feeling that I'm indulging in a particular sense without having to actually break my fasting window or eat said food
Is it merely coincidence that we’re craving gourmands — dessert-like fragrances that remind us of the food we’re not supposed to eat while dieting — at the same time that diet culture is redoubling its efforts to make us, and keep us, extremely thin?
“For someone who’s severely restricting their intake, whether they’re participating in chronic dieting or disordered eating, these fragrances definitely provide opportunities for vicarious consumption,” says Emily Contois, associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa and the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture. To Contois, gourmands fit nicely into diet culture’s obsession du jour: limiting sugar. “We went from low-fat to low-carb,” she says, charting the progression of fad diets from The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise (first published in 1979) to the Ketogenic diet (popularized in the ’90s). “Now, every survey we look at of consumers, they’re trying to avoid sugar. We’ve seen the soda market, for example, completely bottom out.”
Data reflects our aversion to sugar. According to Spate, “sugar-free” averages 1 million monthly Google searches, topping queries for “low-calorie” and “low-fat.” Gourmands, often marketed using food-speak like “juicy” and “delectable,” play perfectly to market demand and are becoming quasi-stand-ins for the high-calorie, sugary delights the diet industry tells us to avoid. It’s a phenomenon that reminds Contois of the heyday of Yoplait Whips, low-fat yogurt sold in flavors like key lime pie and orange crème. They were advertised as a “guilt-free” way to satisfy sweet cravings. “The promise isn’t just that the yogurt is delicious or maybe offers some nutrition,” Contois says, “but that it’s a replacement for the real dessert… which of course, it isn’t.”
It’s not just flavored yogurt that we’ve been taught to substitute for food we deem too caloric. Chewing gum, Diet Coke, and even cigarettes are often used, consciously and unconsciously, to distract ourselves from hunger. “These are, on the surface, quite normal behaviors,” Laura Thomas, a registered nutritionist and the author of the newsletter Can I Have Another Snack?, says of habits like opting for a zero-sugar, calorie-free soda instead of something more substantial. “But if we think about it, they’re really disordered. Sniffing a perfume that is trying to mimic or replicate food is just another way that we try to short-circuit our appetite cues. We’re taking ourselves further away from our embodied wisdom about what, when, and how much to eat.”
Hannah Nelson, a social media marketing manager for a cosmetics company, started intermittent fasting in 2019 after learning about the practice from an influencer. About five days a week, Nelson stops eating at 10 p.m. and fasts until 2 p.m. the next day; she ingests nothing but water, black coffee, or tea for 16 hours. To help her power through, the 33-year-old often reaches for what she describes as “bready gourmands,” scents that smell like pastries or cereal. A spritz of Profumo di Firenze’s Fior di Pane or Snif’s aforementioned Crumb Couture, two of her favorites, are particularly helpful for the 10 a.m.-to-noon slog, a window that proves particularly difficult. “[Gourmands] give me the feeling that I’m indulging in a particular sense without having to actually break my fasting window or eat said food,” she says. “I get that hit of dopamine without feeling guilty.”
Guilt is a powerful force in our relationship to food. Diet culture has ingrained in most adults that salad and grilled chicken are “good”; cheeseburgers and ice cream are “bad.” Food is moralized and by extension comes to define the character of the person consuming it. Of course, this mindset frames weight as a personal choice (in reality, it’s largely determined by genetic and environmental factors). In a culture that perpetuates weight stigma, fatness translates to laziness. If you’re fat, you ate too many “bad” foods and slacked at the gym. If you’re fat, you didn’t try hard enough to be thin. Thinness, on the other hand, is a display of willpower — and we laud willpower as an indicator of work ethic. It’s no wonder, then, that these biases take a socioeconomic toll on fat folks, particularly on fat women. In addition to linking weight and professional success, a 2022 report by The Economist found that women face greater economic consequences for their weight than men: “Rich women are much thinner than poor women but rich men are about as fat as poor men.”
Somewhere between my early and mid-teens, I picked up the notion that sugar is toxic, addictive, and, worst of all, fattening (all myths, it turns out). Sugar, I learned, lurked everywhere: in bread, in the chocolate soy milk I loved to drink, even in fruit. So I began to track my consumption of these sneakily corrupt foods using a smartphone app — to eat no more than 25 grams of sugar per day was my goal. At the height of my obsession, I chewed candy and spat it out. I could taste what I so desperately wanted to eat, without actually ingesting it. Unsurprisingly, this only made me crave sugar more.
“What we tell ourselves we can’t have becomes very alluring,” says Alexis Conason, a clinical psychologist and the author of The Diet-Free Revolution. “Part of the reason that foods take on emotional value is this idea that certain things are forbidden. That same moral prohibition extends even more generally to pleasurable experiences. I can see how [fragrances] that speak to a forbidden desire could be alluring.”
Under the Diet Industrial Complex, desserts are contraband. Sweet foods are characterized as “sinfully delicious” and “tempting.” They are “empty calories,” reserved only for special occasions. They are also coded feminine, the opposite of protein-filled “dude foods” like steak and chicken wings. The cultural link between sweetness and femininity isn’t lost on the fragrance industry, which tends to market gourmands “for her.” (When gourmands are “for him,” they smell like gin, whiskey, and coffee.) Take, for instance, Guerlain’s La Petite Robe Noire, an almond-berry blend, and Parfums de Marly’s lychee-pear-vanilla Delina Exclusif: The former is advertised as the olfactive equivalent to the little black dress; the latter is packaged in a pastel pink flacon adorned with a matching pink tassel.
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a former food writer and the current chair of gender studies at the University at Buffalo, is wary of the message these gendered marketing tricks send. “We always want to be worried when women are being encouraged to be sweet,” she says. “The demand on femininity is to be smaller, to be docile, to be adorable, and to therefore not take up space. The demand that women, or anybody, be cute is actually very aggressive… It’s really about making sure that the object is pliable and squishy and manageable.”
Kyla Wazana TompkinsWe always want to be worried when women are being encouraged to be sweet
With just one spray, gourmands fulfill the demands of both femininity and diet culture. They make us smell sweet, palatable, and appealing. They make us consumable and help us restrict our consumption. They are the literal fumes we run on, delaying the point at which we eventually, inevitably, must eat.
Diet culture likes to posit restriction as control. But eschewing pastries and sundaes, working to outwit our cravings with sweet perfumes and sugar-free drinks, is deeply disempowering. “Diet culture is used as a way to distract women from engaging politically and professionally in society. It uses up our financial resources and our cognitive resources so that we cannot spend them on other things,” Thomas says. “It’s another way to keep women quiet and small, both in a literal and metaphorical sense.”
When we restrict sugar, we don’t just deprive ourselves of a cookie’s nutty warmth or the tangy creaminess of crème brûlée — we also deprive ourselves of social connection. “If you think about weddings, birthdays, all of those big celebrations, there’s always sugar present,” Thomas says. At Thanksgiving, we gather over plates of pumpkin pie; on dates, we vet potential love interests over ice cream. Without sugar, we are hungry and alone, left to negotiate a void that no perfume can fill.
