Leonardo And The 10% - Thoughts On Esxence 2025

I should probably resist the urge to place a cliche at the core of the argument I’m about to make. But as I’ve spent the last few days smelling cliches, I’m going to go with it. The smelling is, as you may have guessed, a reference to this year’s Esxence perfume trade fair in Milan — the largest exhibition of its kind in the world — which I finally decided to visit. But one day before I braved the vast interior of the MiCo convention centre, I went along to Santa Maria delle Grazie to view nothing less than Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. And that’s where the cliche comes in.

The Last Supper was commissioned by Da Vinci’s long-time patron, the Duke Of Milan. It was meant to fulfil a particular brief, in that it had to decorate the refectory of a building whose inhabitants were dedicated to religious devotion. It was supposed to present its audience with a scene that would be familiar and easily understandable. It was meant to be pleasing to the eye. As is well known, Da Vinci met all these requirements, but he also managed to achieve a considerable measure of originality while working within the constraints that were placed on him. Indeed, through the painting, he was able to display and express his unparalleled artistic genius, to the extent that hundreds of thousands of people still flock to see it every year, even though time and human carelessness have altered its appearance, and it has had to be restored a few times during its long life.

You can see where I’m going with this. The link between commissioned art and perfumery has been made once or twice before. It is, as I’ve just written, something of a cliche. But it feels apt to return to it in light of my trip to Esxence.

To put it in one sentence, the event was a marketplace. But then it didn’t pretend to be anything else. Yes, the idea of perfumery as an artistic endeavour was never far below the surface of its frenetic atmosphere, but the focus was on selling, which is why the attendees who elicited the brightest sparkles in the brand-owners’ eyes were the buyers and the distributors. Given how explicitly transactional the whole shindig was, I confess I was somewhat surprised by the negativity with which so many described it. Indeed, of the people I spoke to who’d attended before, not a single one stated that this year’s event was an improvement on previous editions. The only aspect they felt able to praise was the layout.

Was the problem that their expectations were too high, or that mine were too low? Esxence 2025 was reportedly the biggest yet. Over 300 perfume houses were present officially, with several more in attendance as ‘visitors’. Maybe the folks who’d been there before were under the impression that an increase in the number of brands would result in an increase in the number of commendable perfumes. If that’s the case, perhaps they needed reminding that there’s no direct correlation between quantity and quality.

My personal view is that, when it comes to events of this nature, it isn’t realistic to expect more than about 10% to 20% of the exhibitors to possess the sorts of ambition and integrity that the likes of you and I would want brands to have. And by ambition and integrity, I mean genuinely placing creation at the heart of their work and using marketing and publicity to serve the fragrances, as opposed to devising a marketing strategy first and leaving the perfume as an appendage to be tagged on at the end of the process. And, with that percentage in mind, I’m pleased to say that I did spot 30, if not more, brands for whom composition was an endeavour to be treated seriously. Many of them were already familiar to me; some were pleasant discoveries. The key question is not whether such brands still exist, because clearly they do, but how much longer they’re going to be able to survive.

A quick stroll through the fair made it obvious that a large chunk of the remaining 80-90% of the brands — the ones that try to woo potential customers with forgettable plonk housed in flashy bottles — enjoy significant financial backing. Treating perfumery as an easy way to make a fast buck isn’t a new phenomenon, but it does seem to have gone up a notch in recent years, with many investors pouring hefty funds into lacklustre projects, convinced they’ll reap dividends before too long. The cost of hiring a standard-sized stall at this year’s Esxence was reportedly €8000. There were quite a few brands that had hired extremely large spaces (around 7 or 8 times the size of a standard stall) which they’d kitted out with impressive, high-spec fittings. What’s slightly odd about this is that many of them were brands that neither I nor any of the people I spoke to had ever heard of before. Evidently, their intention was to arrive with a bang, and there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the quality of their perfumes rarely justified the flashiness of their decor. Set-ups like these may well be gone in a year or two, but the problem is that during their short life-spans, they can draw a good deal of oxygen towards themselves, thereby taking it away from and suffocating worthier, less cash-rich houses.

This certainly seems to be the current direction of travel. Smaller brands are suffering, wealthier brands are flooding the market with uninspired, generic nothings, the consumer is growing increasingly disgruntled, and the industry as a whole seems to be heading towards a period of relative stagnation, at least in terms of creativity, if not lucrativeness. One response to this could be to throw our arms up in despair and hit eBay in search of vintage treasures. Or it could be to muster renewed vigour to champion the houses that are honestly trying to balance financial imperatives with artistic intentions: the Da Vincis of the fragrance world.

And right now, relatively fresh from my Milanese adventure, I think that’s the main thing I’m taking away from Esxence. Heaven knows, there are moments when all my perfume-related work feels like a monster that could, if permitted, take over every single aspect of my life. Preparing and broadcasting the YouTube videos takes up a considerable amount of time, as does writing these Substack posts, maintaining some sort of a presence on various social media channels and, of course, the most important task: wearing, smelling and evaluating the olfactory creations I strive to review. There are only so many hours in each day and I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to devote any more to fragrant activities. But the Esxence experience has left me with the conviction that some sort of shift has to take place: that I need to work even harder to seek out the perfume houses that deserve to have their output enjoyed by a wider audience, and also to continue to shine a light on the ones that are trying to blind us with bling.

As I say, the ‘how’ is something that I haven’t quite worked out yet, but I take comfort from the fact that I’m not entirely alone. Yes, I do think that critics who do the sort of work I aim to do are increasingly becoming a rarity (I was actually called “an endangered species” by one brand at the event) but there are still a few of us around, and we seem to be getting joined by a gradually growing number of retailers (outlets like Sainte Cellier, Galop, Mood Scent Bar and Lucky Scent) who are doing their best to make customers aware of a range of attention-worthy, smaller brands such as Eris, Neela Vermeire Creations, Les Indemodables, Tauer, Parfum D’Empire, Indult, Francesca Bianchi, Papillon, Hiram Green, Isabelle Larignon, Puente, Marc-Antoine Barrois, Ostens, Eau De Boujee, Frassai, Miya Shinma and J-Scent, to name just a handful. I can’t entirely ignore more famous, mainstream brands, in the same way that the independent brands can’t ignore them either, because rightly or wrongly, it’s the big players that play a crucial role in keeping the industry as a whole afloat. Plus, I remain open-minded about the output of all corners of the olfactory landscape, and I know that every single year, we get at least a few gems from both indies and high street labels. However, I feel that we’re at a turning point and that we all need to shout louder than ever before to make the names of lesser-known brands heard and recognised. We all need to support each other with this, but I’m confident that as long as we stand our ground, we will find the Da Vincis and we will empower them to satisfy their own artistic impulses as well as the tastes and demands of their customers. With our backing, true perfumery will continue to be practised, endorsed and appreciated. And who knows, if we work hard enough, it might even stick around as long as The Last Supper.

Here’s to a gorgeously-scented future!

Persolaise