Perfume. Detailing a specific category trend
Beauty is a fascinating category and one we know well. I was recently analysing trends within, and something cropped up that I thought I’d share.
When people talk about beauty, there tend to be 6 major themes, each with their own sub themes. One of the major themes is the discussion of style choices. Within that, there are ten sub themes.
Of course, we can see how these things trend over time, and this is where it gets interesting. Look at Perfume - it’s jumped massively recently, and has been on a positive trend over the last 5 years.
We confirm this trend with search. I have compared to makeup for arbitrary reasons. Perfume searches have also been increasing over the five year period, so we know it’s a legit trend. We have included forecasting, as well, and I go back to 2014 because it helps with forecasting. Plus I like the way it looks. Nice smooth lines…
Given that this toipic we are looking at is people discussing style choices and options, this suggests there’s a shift in the culture around perfume. So, what is it?
We are going to take a look at some of the most important terms to the topic and see how they trend over time. They are ordered from (linear) trending up to trending down, and their relative proportion is evident.
This gives me some clues. Ariana Grande’s perfumes are apparently so hot right now. But I can see that sweet scent(s) are up, as are vanilla scents. We can also see how important other people noticing and commenting on your scent is.
It’s nice when people say you smell good, or so I’m told. One day I hope to experience this.
For greater context, I want to see what these terms are closely related to. We isolated comments where these terms come up and, using some fancy statistical magic, see what else they say alongside it. Let’s start with Ariana Grande.
Sweet scents. Fruity, or notes of wood and sage. Vanilla is also there. As is cotton candy. Etc. I also note the importance of ‘smell different’ which, given that a major benefit of wearing perfume is getting complimented, is an important feature of a perfume.
Le’ts take a look at sweet scent.
Gourmand. What’s that?
“A gourmand fragrance is a perfume consisting primarily of synthetic edible (gourmand) notes, such as honey, chocolate, vanilla or candy. These top and middle notes may be blended with non-edible base notes such as patchouli or musk. They have been described as olfactory desserts.”
Fascinating. What I’m taking from this is that, increasingly, people want to smell like a cake. We need to check this, though. Is this translating to behaviour indicative of purchase intent? To check that, we’ll use search trends. We’ll use the search index for each trend to represent the terms popularity compared to its own history, and share of search to compare the popularity of each term. We’ll also forecast, and will look back over the last 5 years. Importantly, we are isolating to the search category of perfume.
I found that this website gave a good navigation of the main fragrance families, so we’ll compare those first.
Exploration of most of these scent families are up across the board, which is in line with our general discovery that perfume is up in general. But we can see the families with the strongest trajectory are amber and gourmand.
Amber
“In a word: evocative. This fragrance family’s signature is highly aromatic notes like heady vanilla, smoky incense and complex spices, sometimes blended with citrus, leaves and fruit for freshness. Expect to be transported to exotic far-flung places.”
Gourmand
“Outrageously indulgent. If you love dessert, this fragrance family will be just what your sweet tooth ordered. Edible notes of creamy vanilla, buttery caramel, nutty praline and sugared fruit combine to create scrumptious scents worth swooning over.”
Let’s get more specific. Let’s look for some of those specific scent components within the perfume category.
A lot of them are up, but none more so than vanilla, which exactly matches what we saw from the topic modelling. We’ve seen that floral is also important in the context of ‘sweet’ smells, so I think it’s safe to say that we’re talking sweet smelling floral components.
To summarise…
Perfume is currently a hot topic, with people exploring new scents. It appears that sweet scents are all the rage, especially vanilla, candy, and sweeter floral/fruits. Given the importance of people noticing your differentiated scent, people are exploring these to find a unique scent to them, get noticed, and get complimented.
Olfaction is an important sense. The implications of this relatively new area of exploration are huge. For brands, for the category, and for related categories. E.g. clothes.
This is an example of ‘what is’. We also work with ‘what was’, and ‘what will be’.
If you want to know more, or learn about other areas of the beauty category, get in touch!
