Part 2: American Perfume & Culture as Marketing

7. A Much Younger Story

American perfume as an industry doesn’t meaningfully exist until 1946. There’s no colonial-era equivalent to Laird’s on the fragrance side, no organized American perfume house, no 18th-century recipe worth reprinting. Washington did have a favorite scent, Number Six, sold out of Dr. William Hunter’s Newport apothecary. The apothecary opened in 1752; the cologne itself didn’t debut until 1772, and Washington bought it on a visit to Newport in 1781. That apothecary is still in business today as Caswell-Massey, and still sells the same cologne. He liked it enough to give it away as gifts, shipping cases of it to Lafayette in Paris. One preference isn’t an industry.

What America does have is Estée Lauder, and her own story is, fittingly, an immigrant story. She was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Queens, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. She and her husband Joseph founded Estée Lauder Cosmetic Co. in 1946 out of a former Manhattan restaurant, cooking up formulas on the restaurant’s old burners. The company’s real turning point came in 1953 with Youth-Dew, a bath oil doubling as a perfume. Lauder deliberately avoided calling it perfume at all, because at the time, women didn’t buy fragrance for themselves, they waited for it as a gift. Youth-Dew ignored that rule on purpose. Sales went from $400 a week to $5,000 a week by 1955, then past $800,000 a year by 1958. Thirty years after launch, it was still doing $30 million worldwide.

Estée Lauder at work, mixing formulas herself.

Aramis followed, Estée Lauder’s men’s line, created in 1963 and on counters in 1964, another early and lasting piece of the American fragrance world. The brand is still active today. It launched Intuition in 2025, fronted by Dwyane Wade, and followed it with Intuition Intense in 2026.

Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass complicates the timeline further, though even its date is contested: Basenotes and Parfumo put it at 1934, Fragrantica and the Perfume Projects bottle museum at 1936. It was a real, mass-marketed perfume with department store distribution, and it gets called a candidate for the first American perfume outright — though Arden had already tried and failed with fragrances under her own name as early as 1929. It didn’t build an industry around itself the way Lauder’s company did. One successful product line is closer to an industry than one man’s cologne preference, but it’s still not the same as what Estée Lauder built starting in 1946.

Ralph Lauren has an immigrant story too, a first-generation version instead of Lauder’s founding one. Ralph Lifshitz grew up in the Bronx, the son of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. He changed his name at sixteen after years of being teased for it. He built Polo from a single drawer in the Empire State Building, delivering ties to department stores himself. His first fragrances, Lauren for women and Polo for men, launched two weeks apart in March 1978, at Bloomingdale’s, on the 12th and the 26th — by Lauren’s own account the first time any designer released both genders at once.

Ralph Lauren, 1978.

Not every part of this story is about growth. American perfume has a diversity problem it hasn’t fixed, and the industry has its own uncomfortable number to show for it. Career-data aggregator Zippia estimates 68.6% of American perfumers are white, a figure built from a sample of just 42 resumes, for an occupation the federal government doesn’t track as its own category. Treat it as a rough estimate, not a census. A training pipeline running mostly through French perfumery schools has kept the field narrow for decades regardless. That gap runs deeper than this piece has room for.

8. Covered Properly, Elsewhere

Rather than compress African ingredient sourcing or the American perfumers building past that gap into a few lines here, both are already covered properly:

• Africa’s Ingredients: What the Continent Gives Perfumery and Who Actually Benefits covers where the raw materials behind global perfumery actually come from.
• Juneteenth Special: The Builders You Never Heard Of covers Moodeaux, Kimberly New York, Qhue, Harlem Perfume Co., and La Boticá, five American perfumers building real houses today.

9. The American Niche Wave

American perfume splits into two business models today. One chases the department store counter. The other doesn’t.

Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein both stayed in the first camp. Ralph Lauren’s fragrance business moved from Warner-Lauren to a license with L’Oréal. Calvin Klein followed with Obsession in 1985, now licensed to Coty. Both were built for scale from day one, sold everywhere, designed to be mass market.

Lauren, launched in 1978.

Estée Lauder’s own empire owns a genuinely startling share of prestige perfume globally today, Le Labo, Jo Malone, and Tom Ford Beauty among its brands. But a separate wave of independent American houses built something different over the last two decades: Le Labo itself (New York, 2006), D.S. & Durga (Brooklyn), Imaginary Authors (Portland), and CB I Hate Perfume (Christopher Brosius, Brooklyn). None of them started at the department store counter. All of them found an audience directly first, and reached wholesale, where they reached it at all, on their own terms.

10. Houses Worth Knowing

11. American Culture as Marketing

America’s real export in this whole story isn’t a spirit or a scent. It’s the marketing machinery around both, and that machinery runs through books, theater, film, and now platforms that didn’t exist twenty years ago.

Books

The Great Gatsby did more to mythologize bootlegging than any advertising campaign of its era managed. Gatsby’s fortune is implied, and eventually confirmed, to come from illegal liquor sales, and Fitzgerald reportedly drew partial inspiration for the character from George Remus, a real Cincinnati bootlegger known at the time as the “King of the Bootleggers.” A novel that is, at its core, about the emptiness of that wealth still managed to make Prohibition-era excess look glamorous to generations of readers who came after it.

The Great Gatsby, 1925.

Perfume got its own novel too, just a much darker one. Bret Easton Ellis loaded Patrick Bateman’s grooming routine in American Psycho with real brand names, and fragrance collectors have long attached one in particular to him, PS Fine Cologne by Paul Sebastian. I could not find Paul Sebastian anywhere in the novel’s text, so treat the pairing as collector lore rather than something Ellis actually wrote. The lore is real enough on its own terms: it did more for that cologne than the brand ever did.

PS Fine Cologne by Paul Sebastian, long associated with Patrick Bateman.

A newer example skipped fiction and went straight to the source. Heretic Parfum licensed the estate of writer and illustrator Edward Gorey for a 2025 holiday collection of room sprays, including scents named Sumptuous Afternoon and The Haunted Tea Cosy. Heretic’s founder got the deal by sending the estate a cold email.

Sumptuous Afternoon, from Heretic’s Edward Gorey collection.

Theater

American theater took the opposite approach. Where Gatsby glamorized, the stage tended toward tragedy. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof both build entire character studies around alcoholism, not celebration of it. Theater used the same subject fiction did, for the opposite purpose.

Perfume’s relationship with theater runs warmer. Harlem Candle Company partnered with Lincoln Center Theater on a candle honoring its 2025–26 revival of Ragtime, sold as a companion piece to the show rather than a souvenir.

The Ragtime candle, made with Lincoln Center Theater.

Film

Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, launched in 1991, is the moment American celebrity fragrance marketing became something else entirely. The campaign cost $20 million and centered on a short film, White Diamonds Starring Elizabeth Taylor, screened in department stores with popcorn served to shoppers as though it were a theatrical release. It worked. By 2018, the fragrance had generated a reported $1.5 billion in lifetime sales, more than she earned from any Hollywood role. Since 2011, Taylor directed a fixed share in perpetuity to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation — 20% of all sales by one account, 25% of her royalties by another.

The original White Diamonds campaign.

A newer film tie-in shows the same instinct at indie scale. Heretic Parfum partnered directly with Focus Features on a fragrance for Robert Eggers’ 2024 Nosferatu, timed to the film’s Christmas release. It sold out in two weeks, built an 80,000-person waitlist, and has sold a unit every four minutes since restocking. Company revenue grew 150% in 2025, driven by that collaboration and the one that followed it.

Nosferatu Eau de Macabre, Heretic Parfum’s collaboration with Focus Features.

Television did something quieter but just as real, at least abroad. Roy Morgan Research tracked whiskey drinking among 25-34 year olds in Australia climbing from 8.6% in 2006 to 13% by 2013, a jump that started the year after Mad Men premiered in 2007. No equivalent US figure is as cleanly documented, but the timing lines up with the same show driving the same kind of shift here.

Music

Busta Rhymes named Courvoisier in “Pass the Courvoisier” in 2002. The cognac brand saw a real sales bump before he was ever paid to promote it, the endorsement deal came after the song did the work. That freebie became a real business model. Jay-Z built on it directly: he backed Armand de Brignac starting in 2006, featured it in his own music videos, bought the brand outright by 2014, and later sold half of it to LVMH.

Courvoisier, named in Busta Rhymes’ 2002 single.

Armand de Brignac, Jay-Z’s champagne.

Perfume got its own version of that story from a different direction. Beyoncé launched Heat in February 2010, and, by Macy’s own count, it sold 72,000 bottles in its first hour at the chain alone. By 2013, the line had done $400 million globally, one of the best-selling celebrity fragrances ever released. Music didn’t just endorse a scent this time. It built one from scratch and outsold most of the industry doing it.

Metallica took a different approach entirely. In 2018, the band partnered with master distiller Dave Pickerell to launch Blackened American Whiskey, finished with a process called Black Noise, patent-pending at launch: barrels blasted with low-frequency sound waves from the band’s own music to force deeper interaction with the wood. The inaugural batch, labeled 081 for the year Metallica formed, takes its soundwave graphic from the song “Blackened” itself. Every batch since has shipped with its own curated playlist. This wasn’t an endorsement or an ownership stake. It was the band manufacturing the product.

Blackened American Whiskey, finished with Metallica’s own Black Noise process.

What America Actually Contributes, Financially

American celebrities haven’t just endorsed these products lately. Increasingly, they’re making them.

Matthew McConaughey became Wild Turkey’s creative director in 2016. He spent two years with master distiller Eddie Russell developing Longbranch, a bourbon filtered first through American white oak charcoal and then through Texas mesquite. It launched in 2018. Bob Dylan co-founded Heaven’s Door that same year, named after his own song, and supplies the ironwork art on its bottles; the blending is credited to the brand’s own distillers.

Wild Turkey Longbranch.

Heaven’s Door, co-founded by Bob Dylan.

Perfume runs on endorsement more than ownership. Johnny Depp has been the face of Dior Sauvage since 2015. He re-signed in 2023 for a three-year deal reportedly worth more than $20 million, the most lucrative men’s fragrance endorsement in history. Bernard Arnault, CEO of Dior’s parent company LVMH, credited Depp’s image directly for the fragrance’s category-leading sales during a January 2023 presentation of the company’s 2022 results. Brad Pitt became the first-ever male face of Chanel No. 5 in 2012 for $7 million. Zendaya has fronted Lancôme’s Idôle since 2019, joining a roster that’s included Julia Roberts for over two decades.

Zendaya, the face of Lancôme’s Idôle since 2019.

Wild Turkey is owned by Campari, an Italian company. Dior and Chanel are French. Heaven’s Door and Blackened are two of the few names on this list that Americans actually own outright.

Platforms

The newest layer of this is distribution itself. YouTube, Meta, and X are all American companies, built by a mix of immigrants and native-born founders alike: Steve Chen (Taiwan) and Jawed Karim (born in East Germany to a Bangladeshi father and German mother) co-founded YouTube alongside Chad Hurley, born in Pennsylvania. Meta and X trace back to founders born across the country. A craft distillery or a niche perfume house no longer needs a department store campaign or a studio deal to build a global audience. They need a following, built directly, one post at a time.

Part 3 picks up next, covering tiki, the strangest and most invented corner of American drinking culture.

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