The Beauty Icons Making “Smelling Good” A Lot More Interesting

Not too long ago, perfume shopping was all about finding a scent you loved enough to wear every day. Now, though, sticking to just one almost feels beside the point. Everyone’s getting a little less monogamous with their fragrances, spritzing on different combinations and switching things up from day to day — which makes it a whole lot easier to take a chance on something unexpected.

Sure, vanilla and rose will always be favorites, but a tomato leaf note can be just as craveworthy. A $300 niche perfume can go viral right alongside a body mist, and your shower routine might involve nearly as much scent layering as your perfume shelf. Simply put, at a time when people want to smell unique and interesting just as much as they want to smell good, almost anything goes.

It’s not just what’s inside the bottle that’s getting more experimental, either. Biotechnology is changing how fragrance ingredients are made, perfumers are pushing for more recognition — and protection from AI — and founders are drawing inspiration from everything from cultural traditions to neuroscience. The result? A fragrance industry that’s rethinking not just what we smell, but how we create, wear, and experience it.

Ahead, meet the fragrance innovators of Bustle’s 2026 Beauty Icon Awards.

The Nose For What’s Next: Melanie Bender

Follow: @melzbender

Followers: 20,600

Melanie Bender knows a thing or two about building beauty brands that get people talking. After serving as the CEO of Rhode, she’s brought the same knack for world-building to Lore, a perfume line she launched in 2024. Rather than organizing its scents around traditional fragrance categories, the brand builds entire worlds around specific moods. Its five scents take you from the bar to the beach to a lazy morning in bed, often pairing familiar notes in unexpected ways — like passionfruit with mezcal or cereal milk with pink pepper. Together, they feel made for perfume shoppers whose tastes are getting more niche and who want a fragrance that doesn’t smell like everything else on the shelf.

The Scent Stylist: Shaun Neff

Follow: @shaunneff

Followers: 122,000

Forget signature scents. Over the last few years, fragrance has become something to personalize, layer, and switch up based on your mood — an approach Shaun Neff baked into Noyz from the start. With scents like Sh*tty Day and Only Human designed to evoke everything from a bad mood to a much-needed pick-me-up, the idea is to build a scent wardrobe that can keep up with whatever strikes your fancy that day. Even the brand’s Mylk de Parfum, a hyaluronic-acid-infused formula you pour directly onto your skin, makes the whole ritual feel a little more tactile and playful.

The Gourmand Guru: Paul Fino

Follow: @paulreactss

Followers: 3 million

If you want to smell good enough to eat, you should be following Paul Fino, the self-proclaimed “King of Gourmand.” His high-low approach to fragrance has earned him a loyal following on PerfumeTok, where he shares everything from banana-scented shower routines to summer-ready vanilla perfume combos — plus, reviews that tell you (in refreshingly plain terms) what a product actually smells like. And Fino’s taste doesn’t stop at recommendations, either; his gourmand obsession has taken him from creator to consultant, with two Oakcha fragrances of his own and a holiday gift set from Noyz already under his belt.

The Creator-Turned-Founder: Funmi Monet

Follow: @funmimonet

Followers: 571,200

After years of sharing her fragrance finds online, Funmi Monet finally has a brand of her own. For the past two years, the Dallas-based creator has brought her 570,000-plus TikTok followers into the lab as she worked on Influxious, a four-scent collection inspired by her Nigerian heritage. Each one pulls from a different part of that story: There’s a shea butter skin scent, a fruity floral offering that bottles up the energy of Lagos nightlife, and a blood-orange-and-caramel gourmand spiced with Nigerian ginger. And clearly, the wait was worth it. When Influxious launched on Sephora’s website in July, it sold out in just six hours — proof that the future of fragrance belongs to people with something personal to say.

The Perfumer’s Perfumer: Michael Nordstrand

Follow: @michaelnordstrandperfumer

Followers: 18,800

Michael Nordstrand wants you to know the perfumer behind your favorite bottle. With a résumé that stretches from Tom Ford and Jo Malone scents in the 2010s to Orange Grove for Troye Sivan’s Tsu Lange Yor more recently, he knows just how much goes into creating a fragrance behind the scenes. Now, as indie fragrance continues to get more popular, he’s pushing for the industry to rethink some of its old ways of working. This year, he’s launching the Perfumers’ Union, which is advocating for perfumers’ names to appear alongside the scents they create, standard development fees even when a perfume never makes it to market, and keeping AI out of the creative process. Because for Nordstrand, fragrance is art, and its creators should have a bigger stake in what happens to their work.

The Functional Fragrance Pioneer: Yasmin Sewell

Follow: @yasminsewell

Followers: 240,000

It’s no secret that scent is linked to emotion, but Yasmin Sewell is interested in testing just how far that connection can go. After more than two decades in fashion, the former buyer and creative director brought her longtime interest in energy and emotion to Vyrao, the fragrance brand she founded in 2021. Each scent starts with a feeling she wants to tap into, whether that’s self-love, creativity, or mindfulness. The full-sized bottles contain charged Herkimer diamond crystals, neuroscience-backed ingredients selected with IFF’s Science of Wellness program, and affirmation cards like “I trust my intuition” or “believe in magic,” meant to be spoken as a ritual while spraying. It all makes your daily spritz feel a little less automatic — and gives you a reason to actually stop and smell the perfume.

The K-Fragrance Trailblazer: Su Min Park

Follow: @suminp___

Followers: 1,635

K-beauty is bigger than ever, but one category that’s long flown under the radar? Korean fragrances. Su min Park noticed exactly that on a trip to Korea with her husband, Wonny Lee, when the pair walked into a beauty store packed with Korean skin care and cosmetics, only to find the fragrance section filled with the same Western brands they could buy back home in New York. So, they decided to fill that gap themselves, launching Elorea in 2022. Taking a cue from the softer, more intimate fragrances popular in Korea, the brand’s scents tend to stay close to the skin while featuring locally sourced notes like perilla leaf, Korean pear, rice, ginseng, and aged soy sauce. Consider it another dimension of the K-beauty boom — and one that Park is putting on the map.

The Sustainable Scent Maker: Frances Shoemack

Follow: @francesshoemack

Followers: 3,933

“Clean” beauty was already taking off when Frances Shoemack started asking a pretty basic question: Why wasn’t anyone talking about the ingredients inside our perfumes? The former winemaker was surprised to learn just how heavily some fragrances rely on synthetic ingredients derived from fossil fuels, and even more so by the lack of alternatives. So, in 2013, she teamed up with master perfumer Isaac Sinclair to launch Abel, a fragrance brand built around natural ingredients and low-impact packaging. It’s an idea that’s only gotten more ambitious since. With the help of biotech, the brand now creates scent molecules from plant sugars, yeast, bacteria, and fungi — and last year, the brand reformulated the entire collection for better staying power. In other words, Shoemack is proving that going natural doesn’t have to mean settling for less.

The Body Care Builder: Claudia Sulewski

Follow: @claudiasulewski

Followers: 2.1 million

Spend five minutes scrolling through “everything shower” routines on TikTok and there’s a good chance you’ll spot a Cyklar product or two. Founded by OG beauty YouTuber Claudia Sulewski in 2023, the body care brand has quickly become a staple for its seriously good formulas, with a lineup that includes a mandelic-acid-infused deodorant, nutrient-rich body cream, and glycerin-packed body wash. But Sulewski hasn’t forgotten that body care should be fun, too. The scents are just as much of a draw, and many, like Naked Neroli and Vanilla Verve, come in everything from hand cream to perfume oil. For fragrance-layerers, that means a lot more ways to customize your scent.