On perfume, personal bias, and why we trust the people we follow.
Give me a perfume built around nutmeg, balsam fir, black pepper, tobacco, palo santo, cedar, patchouli, vanilla and tonka, and I am already halfway persuaded. These are among the notes of New York, a collaboration between Fueguia 1833 and Gabriela Hearst. Before the bottle is opened, before the perfume touches skin, I have expectations. I am drawn to structure, warmth and restraint. Someone else might read the same notes and anticipate something heavy, dry or overwhelmingly woody. We haven’t even smelled the perfume yet, and already our preferences are at work.
This is why I find the endless debate about whether influencers and content creators can be unbiased rather puzzling. Every few weeks, another discussion erupts about the credibility of someone who receives complimentary products, attends brand events or develops relationships with the companies they cover. These are legitimate subjects for scrutiny, but somewhere along the way, we’ve come to treat bias itself as evidence of dishonesty. As though the rest of us approach the world with perfectly impartial minds.
The Preferences We Think Are Ours
Our tastes are shaped by everything we’ve experienced. The fragrances our mothers wore, the places we’ve lived, the people we’ve loved, our cultural backgrounds and the associations we’ve absorbed without realizing it. Even our understanding of what smells sophisticated, luxurious, feminine or masculine has a history. We inherit ideas about beauty long before we’re old enough to question where they came from.
In his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man, philosopher Herbert Marcuse examined how consumer societies shape human desires, often without individuals recognizing the influence. Advertising, mass communication and prevailing social values encourage us to adopt certain preferences as though they were entirely our own. His observations feel particularly relevant to the fragrance industry, where repetition can turn a perfume into an object of collective desire long before many of its admirers have actually smelled it.
But Marcuse also complicates my argument. If we follow creators because their tastes resemble ours, how independently did we arrive at those preferences? Have we genuinely discovered people who think like us, or have we all been responding to the same advertising, cultural messages and ideas about what is desirable? When thousands of people suddenly declare the same fragrance a masterpiece, I sometimes wonder how much of that enthusiasm belongs to the perfume and how much belongs to the world that has been constructed around it.
Our preferences may feel deeply personal, but they develop within a society that constantly tells us what is worth wanting.
Why We Trust Certain Noses
I think this explains something fundamental about the relationship between fragrance reviewers and their audiences. We gravitate toward people whose tastes we understand. Over time, we learn which fragrance families they love, which notes they avoid, whether they value longevity and projection or subtlety and composition. Their subjectivity becomes useful precisely because we recognize it.
Sometimes a reviewer whose taste differs entirely from ours can be just as valuable. If I know someone consistently loves fragrances I find overwhelming, their enthusiastic recommendation still tells me something. I simply interpret it through my understanding of their preferences.
The philosopher Donna Haraway explored a related idea in her 1988 essay Situated Knowledges. Writing about knowledge and scientific objectivity, she challenged the assumption that anyone can observe the world from a completely detached position. Her argument for acknowledging our partial perspectives offers a useful way of thinking about criticism, too. Recognizing where someone stands may be more valuable than hearing them declare themselves neutral.
Yet there is a danger in surrounding ourselves exclusively with people who confirm what we already believe. We might enjoy following a creator because their opinions resemble ours, but how often does that familiarity encourage us to question our tastes? Marcuse’s concerns about socially conditioned desires become particularly interesting here. The very people we choose because they seem to think independently may be reinforcing preferences that neither they nor we have seriously examined.
Where Bias Becomes a Problem
As someone who writes about perfume, interviews perfumers and founder, I understand how professional relationships complicate judgment. Once you’ve spoken to the person behind a creation, listened to their intentions and learned about the work involved, the perfume exists within a different context. That knowledge can enrich your appreciation, but it can also make criticism more difficult. I try to remain conscious of that distinction. Admiring someone’s dedication to their craft does not guarantee that I will admire every perfume they create.
Gifts, friendships and professional access introduce emotional obligations that are not always obvious, even to the people experiencing them. A creator can genuinely love a complimentary fragrance, just as someone who spends several hundred dollars on a bottle may struggle to admit that the purchase was disappointing. Sincerity and independence are different qualities, and we’re not always good at recognizing the pressures affecting our own judgments.
There’s also the question of what never gets published. Imagine receiving ten fragrances, disliking six and writing enthusiastic reviews of the remaining four. Every word of those reviews may be sincere, but the audience sees only a carefully selected portion of the experience. The creator hasn’t necessarily done anything unethical. Yet what we choose to discuss can influence perception almost as much as what we say.
This is why transparency matters. Audiences deserve to know about commercial relationships, and creators should be prepared to explain their judgments, acknowledge their preferences and reconsider their conclusions. I once disliked Chanel Coromandel, a fragrance I now love. My earlier opinion wasn’t dishonest. My taste changed, as tastes sometimes do, and the experience reminded me that even our most confident judgments can evolve.
I don’t expect content creators to be free of bias. I expect them to be knowledgeable, sincere, transparent about their interests and intellectually curious enough to change their minds. I also think audiences owe themselves the same honesty. We choose whom to follow, whose opinions to trust and which perspectives to dismiss, often without examining the reasons behind those choices.
The question, then, isn’t whether influencers can be free of bias. They cannot, and neither can we. The question is whether they understand the biases they bring to their work, and whether we understand the ones we bring to the people we choose to trust.
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