It’s 1992, Again.
WWD’s fall guide frames dessert fragrances as the indulgence of the GLP-1 era. Mintel data reported by Reuters puts gourmand at 24% of fragrance innovation. The real engine is older and cheaper than either story admits.
By Samuel Sayre
Materials link to the Fragrance Help Library; for where Angel sits in the timeline, see the 20th-century section of Thousands of Years of Scent.
The story being told
It is a tidy headline: appetite suppressed, dessert worn instead of eaten. The evidence for it is thinner than the coverage.
“If your collection is 80% sweet, you don’t have a taste. You have a supply chain.”Samuel Sayre
WWD’s fall gourmand guide rounds up Byredo, Loewe, Sol de Janeiro and the rest as dessert you wear instead of eat in the GLP-1 era. Perfumer & Flavorist is more careful. It reports anecdotes of GLP-1 users becoming more fragrance-obsessed and a plausible mechanism (food reward drops and other senses get louder). It also notes that no large controlled study has confirmed any of it. The market shift is real: Reuters reported in October that Mintel puts gourmand at 24% of fragrance innovation, up from 9% two years earlier.
The drug story may turn out to be a real second-order effect. But the industry did not discover vanilla in 2024. It has been selling the same sweetness in waves since the first Bush administration, and each wave arrives with a new cultural explanation attached.
The gourmand cycle
Four waves. Same molecule. Different excuse each time.
Angel, and the slow start
Angel was composed by Olivier Cresp with Yves de Chiris for Thierry Mugler. Nothing on the counter smelled like it: candyfloss and caramel over praline and a huge patchouli in a blue star. The trick was ethyl maltol, barely used in fine fragrance before 1992, over a bitter patchouli that stopped it being edible. It sold slowly for its first few years, then overtook No. 5 as the best-selling perfume in France. Every gourmand since is a footnote to it.
The second wave: pink sugar and fruity florals
Aquolina Pink Sugar (2003), Miss Dior Chérie (2005), Britney Spears Fantasy (2005). The excuse this time was youth: a generation raised on lip gloss and body spray wanted perfume that smelled like it. The structure was Angel with the patchouli removed — ethyl maltol, vanillin, fruit esters, white musk — which made it cheaper, sweeter and shorter-lived.
The third wave: “grown-up” gourmand
La Vie est Belle (2012), Black Opium (2014), the vanilla-tonka ambers, the coffee flankers. The excuse: sophistication. Iris and praline, coffee and vanilla, a woodier base. Under the hood it was the same ethyl maltol / ethyl vanillin / coumarin sweetness, now dosed with more restraint and priced higher.
The fourth wave: vanilla everything
Kayali Vanilla 28, Sol de Janeiro’s body mists, Guerlain’s $660 Vanille Planifolia going viral on PerfumeTok, a hundred dupe houses leading with vanilla because it is the easiest note to imitate convincingly. The excuse this time is comfort, then dopamine, and now GLP-1. The molecule has not changed since 1992. The marketing has.
The real engine
Sweet sells for reasons that have nothing to do with pharmacology.
Three things drive gourmand, and none of them is a drug. First, cost. Ethyl maltol, vanillin and ethyl vanillin are among the cheapest, most stable, most powerful materials in the palette. A little goes a long way and it lasts on skin, which means the formula costs less and the customer thinks it “performs.” Second, legibility. A first-time buyer cannot tell you what iris or vetiver smell like, but everyone knows caramel, and everyone reads sweet as “quality” because it reads as rich. Third, imitability. Sweet accords are easy to copy, which is why the dupe market is wall-to-wall vanilla — and why the mainstream houses, competing with dupes on TikTok Shop, keep launching more of what dupes copy best.
That is the loop. It is a supply-side story, not a demand-side one, and it explains the eight-to-ten-year cycle better than any cultural theory: a generation gets tired of sweet, the industry goes fresh or woody for a few years, a new generation arrives without the fatigue, and the cheapest reliable accord in the book comes back with a new name.
For the everyday buyer the consequence is simple. If you have bought five bottles in three years and they all dry down to vanilla, that is not a preference you developed. It is what you were sold.
Gourmand is not a trend and GLP-1 is not why. It is the industry’s default setting, because it is cheap, legible and easy to copy, and it comes back every decade wearing whatever cultural story is lying around. Enjoy it — Angel is a masterpiece — but know that you are being sold the same molecule for the fourth time.
If your wardrobe is all dessert
Three families that will feel like a new sense, and one rule for buying them.
- Chypre. Bergamot, labdanum, oakmoss (or its modern stand-ins). Bitter, dry, adult. The structural opposite of a gourmand.
- Fougère. Lavender, coumarin, geranium. Coumarin is sweet, so this is a bridge family — sweetness with a spine.
- Green and aromatic. Galbanum, violet leaf, herbs. Nothing edible anywhere in the formula.
The rule: buy one, wear it for two weeks, and notice how differently people react to you. That is what a wardrobe is for. If you want help building one that is not 80% sugar, that is precisely what a consultation does — and the Fragrant Emotions guide is the place to start on your own.
The molecules behind the sweetness
Every material in the gourmand cycle has a Library entry — and if you want a wardrobe that is not all dessert, book a consultation.