Why milky perfumes are having a moment

1. THE TREND: Milky perfumes. Notes range from sour and straight from the teet to the more gourmand pairings of coffee, black tea and flaky cake.
2. WHO’S DOING IT? Indie perfumers like Commodity, Gabar, Zoologist, DedCool and Phlur have been pushing the case for milky notes and scent stories. And, of course, we cannot forget about the influential impact of Lush.
3. HOW CAN I GET IT? Douse your wrists with milk like it’s holy water. Watch A Clockwork Orange and, feeling inspired by Alex’s drink of choice, down a large glass of milk and exhale in people’s faces. Or just spritz on some of these milky fragrances.

For a generation of dairy haters, we sure love a milky scent. Lush’s Super Milk is perpetually sold out, Milk by Commodity is beloved by TikTok, and of course, DedCool’s Xtra Milk has become a favourite among fragrance lovers. In the past two years, searches for “milk perfumes” have tripled according to Google Trends, and beyond just concept, milky notes have been all the rage. Just look at Phlur’s latest body mists: heavy cream, coconut skin, caramel skin, all toting creamy notes.

Milky scents usually take one of four paths. There are milky musks like Arizona Bloom by Floral Street, gourmands like Bianco Latte by Giardini Di Toscana, pure milk like Latte Freddo by Hilde Soliani, and true pastorals like Zoologist’s Cow. Milk is a fantasy note, there is no direct translation into a bottle the way there is for ingredients like rose, sandalwood or coconut. Try to bottle it up and it’ll spoil. So to make a milky perfume you have to make a milk accord first, a combination of multiple scent notes blended to imitate creaminess, making each perfume specific to each perfumer’s interpretation of “milk.”

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But where is this demand for milky fragrances coming from? A return to mother’s milk, maybe? Aside from human and cow, there’s also milk of the poppy, oat, almond, coconut, rice, cashew, hemp and soy. There are so many ways to consume it, and the autobiographical memory we have of different milks can evoke different emotions. For example, the safety you felt as a child being offered a cool cup of milk. “When we talk milky, we talk [about] many other things, not just our relationship with mother’s milk or cow’s milk, it’s much broader than that,” says perfumer Gustavo Romero. “Scent can be a refuge, and also taps into a lot of your own feelings.” Smell is the only fully developed sense a foetus has in the womb and is the most developed sense you have as a child according to perfumer Dawn Goldworm. Because of this, childhood is the most influential period for “the basis for smells you will like and hate for the rest of your life”. In an era where grown women want to be girls again in an attempt to escape from the realities of womanhood, it is no surprise part of the allure of milky perfumes is a yearning for innocence.

In these troubling times, Team of Two Perfumers’ Romero says people need to soothe, and what better salve than the creaminess of milk? In his latest creation for Gabar, he and the brand’s CEO and creative director Phway Su Aye created No. V (Ludlow) Lull, an astringent black tea top note with a lush sandalwood base that exudes an opaline lactating essence. “What I like about milky [perfumes] is that it’s voluminous, it just occupies space. It just softens and rounds everything that you touch,” says Romero. “The scent is a way of disconnecting from the hecticness of the world.”

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Self-proclaimed “milk perfume girl,” @perfumerism has a milk perfume series with over 30 million views on TikTok. Ancestrally hailing from a family of dairy farmers, she agrees it is milk’s sentimentality that’s the reason behind the scent’s rising popularity. “There’s something kind of nostalgic about milk, even if we don’t drink it, it’s pretty universal,” she says. By formula or breast, there is a ubiquitousness to milk. For babies, it is the elixir of life, the soothing salve reached at the sound of their first cry. If we are not well, no wonder people may be unconsciously looking for one of their first comforts.

The popularity of milky fragrances also comes as part of the move away from heavy, heady perfumes and towards lighter, warmer “skin scents” that we’ve seen over the last five years. “We’ve come from really powerful fragrances in the past to now being more close to your skin, being a more of an intimate experience, and exploring creativity with a new generation that actually appreciates that,” Romano says. It’s this non-offensiveness, and the ability to adapt to your own scent, that Carina Chaz, founder and CEO of DedCool, credits as part of the success of Xtra Milk, which has also spawned a detergent, dryer sheets, lotion, room spray, hand cream, and body scrub. “It’s a beautiful expression of yourself.”