My Skin but Nothing - 'Clean' smelling perfumes and the allure of conformity

 Nowadays it seems like everyone is afraid to take up space. From loudly defending the right to be like everyone else to videos of influencers in the same white-beige uniform, it's like there's a war on individuality. And this isn't about people who share common ground, no this is about those who flood someone's comments asking where they got their straight leg jeans from so they can have their exact pair. Proclaiming to be just like other girls has shifted from a sense of camaraderie amongst young women, pushing back against misogynistic mocking to a rallying cry for conformity. If you don't like the same music, same clothes, same perfume and same colors as this narrow definition of a "girl" well now you'll be cast aside and looked down upon.

I'm not the first to say that this is a symbol of a rise of fascism. Tiktok's like this give an insight to something everyone is noticing, the masses are becoming more homogenous than ever, which makes them easier to control.

You may be wondering what that has to do with perfume?

Well, quite a bit actually!

Once upon a time "skin scents" were just perfumes without large projection. They were intimate, sat close to skin, but they weren't necessarily soft. A spicy or*ental (outdated term, but more accurately describes what I'm thinking of more than 'amber') could settle into a skin scent before long. But now, skin scents are used to describe ambroxan heavy, barely there perfumes.

If you have no idea what an ambroxan heavy perfume is, look no further than Glossier 'You', the shining star of this scent category. Glossier 'You' rose in popularity during the 2020 pandemic (although the pandemic is very much still happening), alongside the rise of "clean girl" and it makes sense. During a time filled with sickness, people were looking to be almost sterilized, their visual appearance a marker of clean health as anxieties rose. So it's no wonder a perfume that smells like nothing took the girls by storm. There was nothing messy about it, it was reminiscent of clean, washed skin. Not soapy however, that's a different category that holds perfumes such as Replica's 'Bubble Bath'.

The popularity of 'my skin but nothing' perfumes have only increased. Molecule 01, JHAG Not a Perfume, the Glossier 'You' flankers. All marketing themselves as smelling different on every body and "enhancing pheromones" but there's a problem.

They all smell the same.

And not in the traditional designer perfumes all being a vague fruity-floral-amber mess but in that the marketing is only telling half the story. Sure they smell different to an extent as everyone's skin brings out different aspects but for the most part they smell of the same musky-ambery nothingness. Theres a falsity to its promises. 'Buy this perfume that smells like nothing and you'll be a unique individual with little effort.' It's blandness is a comfort in a way, as people can pretend to be unique as they only make a whisper in a crowd. 

It calls back to this image.

Each person here thinks they're a unique individual, only to be met with the startling reality of their own conformity. When you wear 'You' or 'Not a Perfume', you can buy into its claims of smelling unique on each person. Until you smell it on someone else and you realize 'huh, that's kind of familiar'. There's no risk involved, no trial and error of finding a perfume that embodies your personality and style. No risk of not liking something or even coming across unlikable yourself.

There's no thick jasmine of Mugler 'Alien', no swampy green of Cacharel 'Eden', and definitely no rich cherry-leather smell of Room 1015 'Cherry Punk'. For many, being an individual is out, there's no reason to interrogate yourself and your interests if you can't be picked out of a crowd.

This isn't the same as office-friendly scents, which are just perfumes you can wear that smell pleasant without choking everyone in your cramped space out. This is the appeal of nothingness. Of fitting in but convincing yourself that you're really different while also not making any efforts to make a real impression.

There's a contradiction involved, as with anything. People are no longer proud to step outside the box and if they do? Well they just copy. There's an insecurity involved in not wanting to be the first person to stand out so instead you copy someone else and hope the momentum that propelled them works for them as well.

Maybe that's why 'clean' smelling perfumes have evolved from being a symbol of health to a symbol of sameness. As you hop from clean girl to coastal grandma to tomato girl every few months there's no need to really find something that represents you.

You don't know who you are.

"It Girls" and the failure of the Tumblr Renaissance

 “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”

― Anais Nin

“Clean girl”, “That girl”, “It Girl” we are in a fucking girl-pocalypse and I for one am sick of people acting like any of you have the range. I mean I saw this coming back in 2020 when we were talking about the whole “main character energy”. The real pandemic is people repackaging tumblr era subcultures and aesthetics as if it’s a brand new thing that they created. I’ve been on the internet since they were learning not to slob on their mush peas and they’re telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about.

The real issue is that these self proclaimed “It Girls”' (because lets be honest they only reached it girl status because they forced it), don’t know their history. They reference without knowing what they’re referencing, they don’t know their cultural context. That’s how we have reductive wannabe’s like Aliyahsinterlude who are able to browbeat everyone with “aliyahcore” even though it’s just late 2000s rave aesthetic with costumey “Y2k” color palettes and silhouettes. Throw in a little gyaru while we’re at it, why not. 

People forget the beauty of It Girls was how mundane and almost nerdy they were. Chloe Sevigny was just a random girl in New York’s underground scene who attracted people with her easy nature and guileless eyes. Tavi Gevinson was a regular yet artistic girl who started off taking pictures in her room. Hell, even Anna Karina was a teenage runaway who didn’t speak French. But these girls have personality, they have clear interests that make people want to know more about them.

It girls of the 2010s were born and bred on tumblr, and people are still clamoring to replicate that allure on tiktok and twitter to a lesser extent. It doesn’t work. They can’t monetise it they way they can on Tiktok and Instagram. Everyday girls on Tiktok cry and whine about not being a Tumblr girl during it's heyday and God I'm glad they weren’t. They seek to be popular for popularities sake. They’re quirky in a highly curated way. Everything is empty and vacuous behind their lobotomised stares. 

It’s easy to buy your way into coolness. Wanna seem quirky and cute? Pay $20 for a Sonny Angel figurine. Wanna be mysterious and interesting? Carry around the latest slop by Otessa Moshfegh and pose with a cigarette you won’t smoke. The Tumblr Renaissance has been rumbling since 2020 and it won't ever work because people don’t care enough. So instead they take what the Tumblr girls have been doing for the past 2-4 years and bring it to Tiktok like it’s the new hot thing, And don’t you dare ask for credit or swarms of perfectly coiffed yet deliberately messy “it girlbloggers” in training will swarm your comments saying your not good enough because you didn’t spend $40 on a mediocre lip gloss.

Everybody wants to make a statement but nobody has anything to say. It’s not cool to care or to develop unique interests when someone has a ready made personality pack on Depop so you can pretend to be subversive. When you see someone else’s personality gain them 100k on Tiktok why carve your own niche when you can just wear their skin. We saw it with the Alida Simone clones and their constipated smiles (disregarding the fact that Alida smiled like that because she wore braces and was in her teeny key west kitten porno phase).

We will never get a real Tumblr Renaissance and we need to let sleeping dogs lie. Girls prefer to rewrite history instead of learn it because they’re mad they didn’t do it first as we see with the bizarre reframing of Coquette as a hyper feminine Rococo inspired aesthetic to make it more palatable to outside audiences instead of embracing the messy, vulgar, uncomfortable aspects of it that made it truly subversive. “Reclaiming girlhood” just doesn’t have the same conservative, capitalist ring as “reclaiming femininity” needed to mold future alt right tradwives in the making. It’s also much harder to do a Brandy/Shein/Amazon haul if the subculture you wanna infiltrate is based on self expression when you have none. Sad to see.