The Scent of Skin

From Molecule 01 to Mark Fisher, Bee Beardsworth investigates our desire to bottle corporeal closeness and a yearning for a future that never materialised.

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The first time I smelled Marlou’s Doliphor, I had a visceral reaction. The hairs on my arms stood on end. I was transported. An ivory-walled room, dry with summer heat but saturated with lust, corporeal condensation sliding down the walls. Shards of sunlight danced on the ceiling, chipping away at the shadowy corners as linen curtains danced under the tugs of a voyeuristic breeze. Sheets drenched in feral human scent, the smell of dried sweat and intoxicated half-dreams, infatuated bodies ouroborously entangled around each other. The softly seductive smell of the back of a lover’s neck as I pressed my face into the slightly sweet, slightly saline, almost untouched crevice. 

I had never smelt a perfume so skin-like. It felt alluring yet unsettling, fleshy vulnerability and animalic allure distilled and bottled like some sort of Hannibal fantasy that perfectly overlapped with my own halcyon memories of a lustful bygone summer. It felt human, close, safe. I was obsessed. 

In a myriad of constantly shifting scent trends, our love of the so-called Skin Scents seems not only to endure but repeatedly return to the leader’s position. Marrying the chemical with the corporeal, skin scents tout one core promise: your skin but better. What exactly is it that we can’t get enough of? Or is it simply just skin deep?

My love affair with skin scents started early on in my olfactory obsession. In the first throes of my twenties, a 5ml of Le Labo’s Another 13 slipped into my possession, hooking me with its strangely synthetic muskiness. All used up, I went to the Le Lebo counter with the gauche recklessness of a young woman trying to forge her definitive presentation and irresponsibly spent money on a 100ml bottle, printed with my name in the facsimile typewriter font that inevitably rubs off. 

Musing on that period, I realise what made me fall so in love with a scent as simple and subtle as Another 13. Underneath the sheen of artificial ambroxan lies something you can’t put your finger on, something that comes alive on your skin, like an unseen creature moving underneath a pile of discarded clothes. 

Although the molecules that we most often closely associate with skin scents stem back to the animalic notes of the perfume revolution circa late 19th century, the Skin Scent is — ironically — the product of a scent story that is decidedly synthetic. In 1973, IFF created a synthetic aroma-molecule with uniquely woody undertones called ISO E Super. For years, this was laced through perfumes to add a layer of fleshy ambery warmth, most notably Dior Fahrenheit and Creed’s Adventus. 

Claiming to be disillusioned with the predictability of the mainstream industry, perfumer Geza Schoen discovered the chameleonic quality of pure ISO E Super after developing a fascination with how it changed when it touched human skin. In 2006, Escentric Molecules bottled this fascination into their inaugural scent: Molecule 01. This was my next skin scent obsession. 

“We came out with something that was almost impossible to categorise because nobody had experienced anything like it before,” Geza Schoen tells me. “The idea of wearing a single aroma-molecule as a fragrance was almost unthinkable. We made the molecule itself the protagonist. That was a radical idea at the time.” 

Radical indeed, yet also bizarre. What does Molecule 01 actually smell like? Geza describes it as “woody, velvety and cocooning, but also strangely elusive.” I would argue that these descriptors are bordering on wishful thinking, especially to the untrained nose. Whilst Molecule 01 has a smell, the smell is almost nothing. But that’s the point. 

The millennium marked a point of transition — not only chronologically but also psychologically and socio-politically; the crossing of a threshold from a century marked by the most rapidly technological advancements humanity had ever seen to a new era that felt limitless and boundless. Everything had the potential to be modern, minimalist, and sexy — bitten by the Millennium Bug. Consumerism, music, the future… it was all steeped in the sheen of gleamingly slick accelerationism. Tapes turned to CDs, VHS to DVD, computers to laptops and film to digital. Identity moved into a new articulation; hyperindividualism bloomed in the fertile ground of early internet culture. 

Molecule 01 wasn’t a perfume that told you who to be. It was a perfume for the new age. A new age that seemed to have an endless horizon and increasingly formless self-expression, elevating who you already were in a way that, through being a nonconformist, was truly rebellious and revolutionary. From gym to office to club to bed, there was no need to slow down, to change, to disrupt the adhesion from one identity to another. Molecule was simple enough to be streamlined, yet still indicated a sense of superior taste and eclecticism. And because of how ISO E Super adapts uniquely to each skin type, there is only one prerequisite: there has to be a You first. 

Le Labo’s Another 13 and Juliette Has A Gun’s Not Another Perfume both followed in 2010. Despite the similarly chalant names (another perfume…), both scents took the simple seed Molecule had sown and grafted it into something that promised your skin but better with a little something else. Another 13 alchemises ambroxan and ambrette into something warm yet metallic with a strangely synthetic coolness that summons an olfactory imagining of an Under The Skin extraterrestrial humanoid. In JHAG’s Not Another Perfume, Cetalox takes centre stage. A synthetic note created by Firmenich, Cetalox sits somewhere between ISO E Super and Ambrox and was introduced in 1993 to imitate the musky, slightly creamy smell of one of the most expensive and rare perfume ingredients, Ambergris. On my skin it comes through like some sort of high-end eco-disinfectant with a hint of pear. And lest we forget the ultimate It Girl skinscent that had every Millennial worth their weight in American Apparel and Girls in a chokehold: Glossier You. 

Just over a year ago, Skin Scents started cropping up on my FYP. I initially chalked it down as another symptom of the Clean Girl hangover, but they weren’t all fresh linen and your skin but better. Whilst the true and tried aforementioned classics started trending, something new was emerging. Skin scents were getting weird, sexy and even a little dirty. 

With the explosion in popularity of niche perfumery that accompanied the rise of #PerfumeTok in the early 2020s, more subtle scents relying on clandestine whisperings of solo connection shared through screens soared into the limelight. Fugazzi’s Angel Dust is one such wunderkind. Despite the EPD being released in 2021 to lacklustre success, TikTok’s proclivity for platforming the personal lifted the scent from sitting in a bargain bin to flying off the shelves at Sephora. Suitably, the perfume is constructed to "celebrate the introvert,” claiming a gentle strength and silent attractiveness through the use of so-called “polite molecule” Cashmeran, which their copywriter personifies as notorious for intimacy and privacy. Perfect for the Big Tech-terrorised COVID Generation. 

Not to be a stereotypical party girl, but I do have to take it to a place of brat, briefly. Or more specifically the SWEAT Tour, a #collab between popstars du jour Charli xcx and Troye Sivan. Sweat and perfume are a match made in heaven, and in their 2024 press run, Charli and Troye named then-yet-to-be-released Luca from Tsu Lange Yor as their signature scent of that moment — a PR move no doubt spurred on by it being Troye’s brand, but nonetheless another layer of skin scent resurgence. 

Luca is an Ambrox and sandalwood-heavy skin scent with hints of fruit and earthiness, radiating with a warmth and texture like the baby hairs behind your ear. Described as “both grounding and animal,” it was made not for subtlety but for sweat, seduction and (hopefully) sex. “Luca came from wanting a scent that feels close and real, like a second skin,” Troye tells me. “As things get sweatier, those musky and amber notes pop more, making it feel personal and alive. It's built to last through the night and keep things interesting.” It’s no surprise it’s the brand's top seller. 

But there was one skin scent that truly started the 2020s renaissance: PHLUR’s Missing Person. An ode to heartbreak and longing, the scent of freshly washed skin is mixed with something echoing a clean, empty bed. At once undeniably familiar and deeply melancholic, the perfume logged over 200,000 backorders before it was officially released, owing to viral videos of the tearful reactions evoked by smelling the scent-soaked white boyfriend t-shirt vacuum-packed into the PR pack.  

The familiar, the comforting… is our obsession with skin scents really just that simple of a craving? After all, we can’t go a day without mentioning the loneliness epidemic. But to label the hundreds of thousands of people who love skin scents as simply lonely would require a level of assumption that is both lazy and unlikely. The gay man I met on the weekend has an amazing boyfriend, but he wears Another 13. I love wearing Missing Person to bed, whether alone or not. And before someone mentioned pheromones, the idea that human smell can detect pheromones is actually a total myth.

There is something more abstract lingering underneath our skin scent obsession — something that I think has intensified in the last 20 years. Molecule 01 was an idea of the future: an olfactory utopia of simplicity, efficiency and hyperindividuality. So were its immediate successors. The recent resurgence in skin scents indicates a yearning, but not just for corporeal closeness. We yearn for a past that never materialised. The trend of skin scents came back at the same time Y2K propagated across social media, visually communicating the nostalgia a new generation of consumers has for an era they didn’t experience but that held the promises our current epoch doesn’t. As Mark Fisher posited, the slow cancellation of the future has not only deflated expectations of change but has situated us in a time where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Accompany that with how “the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition,” and how “there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.” 

If we can’t imagine escaping capitalism, then how better to express a silent rebellion and desire for protest driven by a subliminal sense of despondency and nihilism layered with nostalgic melancholia than an overpriced perfume?

It isn't that simple, either. Dousing myself almost daily in different skin scents for the past few weeks, I discovered my final prismatic reflection and favourite experiential element. A sticky, humid day in June saw the launch party for Discothèque’s Next To Me Or Nothing, an opalescent ISO E Super scent laced with sake, milk and jasmine. Drawing inspiration from gauzy dreams of jazzy ‘90s Kyoto, I smell the strange solidarity of bodies pressed close with strangers in a moment of strobe-light fractured hedonism, the feeling of collective effervescence as you lose yourself in others, a haze of ecstasy and indescribably human euphoria. A few days later, I unboxed a tester of Mabelle O’Rama's Lunar Dust. One spritz and my mind wandered from terra firma to ether, the cool, metallic quality leaving an otherworldly scent trail that shimmered like moonlight in a pond. Marlou’s Doliphor has haunted me in the most erotic way since I first tried it months ago. These perfumes speak to the esoteric and the unknowable that underpins everything that is human, the olfactive acting as a bridge to both the nostalgic and the fantastical. In the age of ever-deepening artificiality, to evoke the human is rebellion. It will always be deeper than skin deep.  🌀

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Bee Beardsworth is a perfume princess, Professional Party Girl, semi-retired model and unretired writer known for her innovative approach to fashion, beauty and culture. From her viral videos on perfume to cult beauty writing for Dazed and Coveteur, Bee captivates audiences with her tongue-in-cheek humour, unorthodox insights and charismatic allure. For an ever-updated vantage point of her London life, completed uncurated carousels, and perfume videos such as The Smell of Sex, scroll to @beebeardsworth.