The Human and Ecological Costs of Perfume

I n 2024, the global fine fragrance market was valued at $50.46 billion and is expected to grow by 5.57% annually over the next ten years. The fragrance industry is thriving despite multiple threats, from tariffs to climate change. In fact, it has entered an era of ultra-fecundity with 7,000 fragrances released in 2024, nearly triple the output of 20 years earlier. While we are unlikely to see another le monstre like Chanel 5 from this productivity, the sheer volume is overwhelming. Surely, there is something for everyone, but why limit yourself to just one?

After all, fragrance social media is awash with reviewers standing before shelves filled with flacons. Maintaining an extensive collection says something about the sophistication and taste of a fragrance aficionado. Even the most casual perfume consumer has a wardrobe of fragrances. This level of consumption is easy to understand. Perfume remains a relatively affordable luxury. 

Go to any pharmacy, and you’ll see a wall of celebrity-endorsed mid-tier abundance, with bottles promising love, drama, intrigue, and inner peace. In a world that doesn’t feel very loving or peaceful, fragrance offers a form of sensory escapism that people desire. This industry is built on feeding that desire through fantasy. What the fantasy obscures, however, are the interconnected ecological and human costs of this great olfactive bounty.

The Iceberg

Fragrance is an odd business: part agro-business, part chemical manufacturing, part consumer product. Most people, even diehard aficionados, only grasp the last 10% of the supply chain, which fuels the industry’s mystique. Fragrance feels European and creative. The industry promotes the image of the French perfumer at his atelier in Grasse as the centre of the fragrance world. Indie brands are used as evidence of perfumery’s artisan spirit. Perfumery is positioned as a high art. Corporate responsibility officers will extoll their company’s commitments to anyone who will listen. Social criticism typically focuses on marketing and thus reflects the concerns of 10% of the iceberg. The other 90% lies beneath.

The reality is that fragrance is a global industry. Most fragrance workers reside in middle-income and developing nations and work in agriculture and manufacturing. Some are paid pennies a day. Child labour is a known issue. So are endangered aromatic smuggling and the extortion of wild harvesters by cartels. Whenever these embarrassments reach the press, they threaten the fantasy of luxury and abundance. However, larger players deflect these issues through the risky shift of contracting and middlemen. It wasn’t L’Oreal that used child pickers in the jasmine fields, they have exclusivity contracts with—it was the contracted farmers. L’Oreal’s only failure was a lack of paternalistic oversight. Having driven past those fields myself, I assure you, that excuse only works if the corporation is inept or incompetent. More likely, they knew, but looked the other way to preserve the fantasy and profit margins. Blame shifts down the chain. Profits rise up.

Along Old Roads

A handful of manufacturing companies earn the majority of the industry’s profits in any given year. The industry still runs on economic lines established between the 17^th and 19^th centuries: extracting labour and materials from the Global South to finish in the North, where profits remain. France didn’t dominate perfumery due to heritage or terroir. Its absolute cultural stranglehold came through the mercantilist policies of Colbertism, undercutting other European competitors while subsidising French perfumery. 

In another timeline, the Ottomans might have dominated the 19th-century race to industrialise perfumery. After all, they held the Rosa Damascena monopoly and had centuries of craft knowledge within their borders. However, Ottoman colonial expansion remained relatively local. The French took their show on the road, which gave them an environmentally competitive edge. Botanicals were moved into French-controlled crop-scapes, particularly in Réunion, Egypt, India, Algeria, Vietnam, and Madagascar. Thus creating material monopolies in various environments and a global vertical supply chain under French influence. A 19th-century English perfumer wanting vanilla or vetiver had to buy from the French. French academia and botanical gardens were also tasked with locating and cultivating aromatic plants in colonial crop-scapes along with synthesising aromatic molecules. With colonial botanicals, synthetics, protectionism, and industrialisation, the French became unbeatable in the late 19^th century. 

Today, the market leaders are based in France, Switzerland, the US, Germany, Spain, and Japan, but they all inherited an industry built on this colonial extraction model, where people and plants are consumable. You can not buy your way out of this. The diversity on display at your local perfume counter is mostly a myth. 

The Myth of Ethical Independence

Even the most indie of indie brands must buy materials from the large agro-chemical conglomerates. Buyouts and mergers are pushing us closer toward monopolies. Corporations want a return to vertically integrated supply chains. So how independent can it be if the indie and niche sectors must kiss the ring for captive molecules or monopolised naturals? Microbrands like Deya and Alchemy Slow Living try, but distilling and testing are expensive. Exclusivity contracts limit partnerships. Language barriers, shipping issues, tariffs, and regulations hamper horizontal networks. Eventually, everyone buys corporate. The independent market is mostly a fiction.

Réunion may no longer be the industry’s botanical laboratory, but Egypt, India, Algeria, Vietnam, and Madagascar still feed the system. While these exports bring wealth to the country’s elite, it doesn’t trickle down. We might argue that global trade, in general, brings investment to rural communities, but what is the value of that investment if Egyptian jasmine fields still use child labour? Indian incense production has long done the same. Algerian growers have been accused of exploiting Sub-Saharan migrants. Moroccan flower pickers have been subject to illegal wage theft from a well-known company with ties to the royal family. Vietnam has rampant issues with poaching and document forging of aromatic woods. Malagasy vanilla farmers earn $1.90 a day; while a kilo of vanilla absolute sells for $7,000. The list is endless.

With all these commitments to ethical trade and environmental sustainability, why is there so little material improvement? Likely because the wealth generated was never meant to flow back to the hands and lands that made it possible. Rising living standards in middle-income countries also raise costs. Sustainability practices that don’t also address consumption have limited effects. As long as supply is stable and consumers stay unaware, the industry has no financial incentive to improve factory or farm conditions beyond a certain level. After all, those workers are contractors; they can always shift the blame.

Likewise, environmental blame shifts down the chain. The market leaders didn’t poach agarwood to collapse. Consumers just bought triple the legal plantation stock in one year somehow, but I’m sure the paperwork was fine. In my research, I was able to buy forged CITES export permits for $20 that would allow me to hide illicit agarwood in plantation stock. Illicit oud is sold openly on Facebook and Etsy.

Demand for natural and synthetic materials is at an all-time high. Chinese geranium farms once produced two yearly harvests for the essential oil market. Now, they are pushed to harvest every two weeks from March to October.  Do you know how much nitrogen you need to pump into the soil to turn a field over fourteen times in eight months? Wild products simply can’t meet this demand. The collapse of frankincense, myrrh, agarwood, and sandalwood is imminent. 

Climate change is one aspect, but lack of mitigation, corruption, and demand are significant factors. Agarwood and sandalwood can be grown using a plantation model. Frankincense and myrrh cannot. The loss of these trees will be such a blow to the world’s intangible culture that each of us in this industry will be held accountable on the Day of Judgment for what we have squandered.

Synthetics, long demonised by the chemophobes, offer a respite for naturals, but they also carry an ecological price. Fast production means more CO₂ and more risks. Maybe not in factories in Germany, but what about the ones in the suburbios of Rio? If chemical waste ends up in the streams of middle-income countries, would anyone care? Move fast and break stuff sounds fun when we are talking about computer games, but it’s another thing when what we might break is our water supply.

It’s All the Same Problem & It’s an Old Problem

For many, the ecological and labour issues of the supply chain are separate. I disagree. Their compartmentalisation is not just flawed but dangerous. They are different facets of the same, very old, concern. Ignoring their connection means failing to address these problems entirely. The system that devours people has no problem devouring the land and vice-versa. 

As the social theorist Murray Bookchin wrote:

“The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man… But it was not until organic community relations… dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly… The plundering of the human spirit by the marketplace is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.”¹

Perfumery began in the late Iron Age in Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Indus Valley kitchens. It was an extension of these communities’ olfactive cultures, a natural expression of human creativity and our relationship with the environment. Social Ecology teaches us that humans are part of nature. We are not an alien virus, as the fatalists claim, nor are we ‘self-made’. Instead, we are masters at developing symbiotic relationships with plants and animals. The rose gave us beauty, and in exchange, we have spread her over the face of the earth and protected her in our walled gardens for centuries. Appealing to human desires has been a very effective survival strategy. Perfumery first emerged as the creative output of the alliance between plants and people. Then came empire. 

Professional perfumery had an imperialist history long before Europeans dominated the market. The profession of a perfumer evolved directly from Assyrian imperial ambition and social hierarchy. The nascent professional industry would have died in its cradle without the loving attention of its parents, The Temple and The Palace. Perfumery throughout most of antiquity was the sole reserve of the elite. It required a ruling class that could afford to maintain artisan workers producing non-essential articles. Those items were made to exonerate gods and kings. As such, the artistic sentiment of ancient perfumery was to glorify the empire. Mesopotamian perfumery, in particular, sought to use botanicals from across their empire, especially newly conquered lands. They also utilised the Assyrian practices of enslavement and forced migration to move labour to the capital cities to work with these new materials. As 1 Samuel 8:13 warns, “The king will take your daughters from you and force them to cook and bake and make perfumes for him.” 

The exploitation of aromatics and those who work with them has a long history. If professional perfumery is an art, it is an imperialist art requiring military expansionism, ecological adventurism, and market control to grow. In return, it has created olfactive art to serve those masters. This was as true for the Assyrians as the French in the 19^th century. Look to Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Persia, Byzantium, the Wei Dynasty, the Chola Dynasty, the rise of the Islamicate, the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the French 2^nd Empire. Each imperial era advanced perfumery’s development. Each empire inherited the gains of the last, sometimes literally. When Western Rome fell, so did Roman perfumery, and with it, a mass exodus of skilled labourers moved to Byzantium.

Historically, perfumery became affordable to ordinary people only during times of total market control. In the late Roman period, common people saw unprecedented aromatic access. Why? Well Rome controlled Egypt, Greece, Anatolia, parts of Mesopotamia, Carthage, and the Incense Road. While it didn’t fully conquer Nubia and Kush, it exerted economic influence through trade. Rome fought the Nabateans for over a century to take the Incense Road. It wasn’t enough to access these routes; they had to dominate them. The sacred resins of the Incense Road became commodities, and people were commodified alongside them.

In the 19th century, France replicated Rome’s global supply dominance. However, the industry was so lucrative that even less advantaged players like the UK, US, and Germany also grew. Commodification, industrialisation, and synthetics changed perfumery forever. For the first time, even the working poor could afford floral waters and cheap colognes. Patrons were no longer the 1% but the middle class. No longer required to glorify god or country, the industry shifted toward bourgeois fantasies. Love and sexual desire took over advertising, but old habits lingered. Orientalist imagery in the 19th and 20th centuries promised the bounty of empire at the feet of the middle-class consumer as if they, too, were kings.

Though the patrons changed, the system did not. It simply made things cheaper, ugly truths harder to see, and the fantasies more elaborate. Industrialisation and marketing allowed perfumery to be mentally severed from the land and labour behind it. Perfumery started as a creation of olfactory culture and was, as Bookchin said, converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly.

Elements of olfactive culture that couldn’t be commodified, like ambergris necklaces and pomanders, slowly disappeared. Community was replaced with commerce. Olfactive culture became a transactional relationship, but one side of the relationship was lost in a dream. The dream promised endless abundance, so we consumed like kings, but the land and its workers cannot support so many royal appetites.

For the Social Ecology of Fragrance

First and foremost, I urge all of us to wake up from the fantasy. We are not kings. Stop consuming like one. We’re plebs. Small material comforts do not fundamentally change that. Perhaps our hyper-consumerism and desire for sensory escapism is, in fact, directly connected to a sense of helplessness. I can’t afford a house and the US government is trying to deport citizens, but I smell like blueberry muffins, so that’s something!

With this awakening comes the truth: the industry is unsustainable. 7,000 new fragrances in one year is not innovation; it is excess. A fruit tree gives its best yield the season before it dies. Applying a Social Ecology lens to our industry helps us see that. Social Ecology is a philosophical and political framework that sees ecological crisis as rooted in deep-seated social problems, particularly those stemming from hierarchical and capitalist structures. Bookchin argued that environmental degradation cannot be fully understood or addressed without confronting issues of domination.

Rampant labour issues hurt the very people making the products we love. Let go of the idea that farm, wild harvest, or factory labour is unskilled. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’d wager, dear reader, that you can’t do these jobs. So, let’s make sure the people who can are treated fairly. When risk is shifted down the supply chain, nothing changes. The same grey zones that allow exploitation also allow environmental destruction. These problems are connected, not coincidental.

For instance, resin harvesters have long faced interference from terrorist groups like Al Shabab and ISIS, as well as clan militias. These groups inserted themselves into the resin trade to fund their operations. Demand for frankincense and myrrh essential oils is so high they can make millions from hijacking or extorting even a small portion of the resin harvest. Unlike narcotics, guns, or human trafficking, resin trafficking holds almost no risk for these organisations. Armed conflict is now considered a major limiting factor in the conservation of frankincense. 

Then there are the cartels plaguing the resin trade, which have been accused of forced labour, withholding wages, paying in food, and assault. Warning bells rang regarding Asli Maydi Frankincense as early as 2018 for forced labour, extortion, and sexual assault. Yet it remained a key supplier to companies like doTERRA until 2023. In 2024, US Customs banned its imports for forced labour. However, Asli Maydi still operates and trades elsewhere. To my knowledge, the industry has taken no public steps to stop this. While corporate power has limits, its influence is vast. Silence in the face of documented abuse is either incompetence or complicity.

Frankincense is also nearing ecological collapse due to overharvesting. Industry leaders fund green initiatives to ‘save’ it, but projects that ignore social and industrial realities will fail. Harvesting communities know how to care for these trees as they have for generations. They’re cutting them to ribbons under pressure from cartels, terrorists, poverty, and climate change. They don’t need doTERRA to build a clinic. They can do that themselves. They need protection from extortion and violence. They need fair wages. The ecological crisis can’t be separated from the social one.

We must see these problems as interlinked and address the avarice at their core. We must see ourselves not as masters of nature, but as partners in its bounty. No one in the supply chain deserves less dignity or share in its wealth. This includes workers and the land. It is a symbiotic relationship. People and plants thrive together in harmony or not at all. I know that sounds sentimental, but we see the cost of this disharmony everywhere. This is what Hildegard von Bingen called viriditas, the divine-greening power of spiritual and ecological harmony. It was the guiding light behind Kenya’s Green Belt Movement that addressed both rural poverty and deforestation by focusing on their connection.

We must also reach beyond our own social encampments. We need to collaborate with people who may not fully agree with us, but can align in key areas. We must avoid scapegoating. When a system is built on exploitation, and fault is compartmentalised or diffused, no one person is the villain. The pursuit of self-interest blinds people to how the system harms. I will never excuse Grasse for its role in creating this system. However, I have also seen the genuine desire for change from my French colleagues. We can both acknowledge the reality of the past and give the grace to grow into something new.

If perfumery is genuinely an art, it must prioritise these relationships over shareholder profit. It must reveal the truth of the human experience. If not, it is not art; it’s corporate swill.

A Return to Olfactive Culture

A few years ago, I was interviewed several times for articles about ‘decolonising perfume,’ a term I neither use nor endorse. The idea of decolonising a multi-billion dollar industry, especially fragrance, is a contradiction in terms. Most of what was seen as decolonial efforts in these interviews were symbolic corporate changes to marketing, language, and hiring. While these actions have merit, they are the basics of corporate progressivism that any business should engage in for PR alone. The use of revolutionary language towards the bare bones of anti-racism feels insufficient and self-congratulatory for those sitting on the top of the iceberg. 

If the objective is truly to remove the stain of colonisation, imperialism, and exploitation from this industry, these acts are rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. The historic exultation of imperial power is ignored, as is the colonial endeavours that built this industry. Greater inclusion of marginalised Westerners in managerial positions can occur without any transformation to systems of power. The 90% of the workforce below the waterline, and the land itself, are left out of this supposed revolution. There can be no transformation without them. 

In each of these interviews, I stated that to decolonise the fragrance industry, it would need to become something else entirely. It would require the de-commodification of aromatic artefacts and a return to olfactive culture outside of commerce. It would focus on the relationship between the person, the community, and the aromata. Perfume with viriditas instead of domination. As a historian, my instinct is to look backwards, but in reality, such a transformation wouldn’t be a restoration. It would be something entirely new. Few things have de-commodified. 

That part never made it to press, likely because it doesn’t end with a comforting takeaway that keeps readers consuming. I don’t think I will live to see post-industrial perfumery, though I think it is a goal we should move towards. In the meanwhile, our industry is old and often harmful, but it’s what we have, and it isn’t going away soon. So, we must do our best to fix what we can and to do that, we need to understand the root of the problem. Applying a Social Ecology perspective to fragrance won’t usher in a brave new world, but it will urge you to question the simple solutions offered for complex problems. It will keep you from being lulled into passivity and apathy about our dark little corners. It will remind you to think of the iceberg below the waterline. It will centre our symbiotic relationships and allow you to see all that connects us. 

Most importantly, you will remember that what happens to the land happens to people. If one is in decline, so is the other. Fixing either means fixing both.

Nuri McBride is a perfumer and educator at Atropos Parfums. Her community work focuses on olfactive cultural education, aromatics in lifecycle rituals, and the preservation of traditional forms of aromatic preparation. Nuri explores the intersection of olfaction and death rituals at the Death/Scent Project and fragrance history in her monthly newsletter, Aromatica de Profundis. She is also co-editor of the journal Alabastron. 

References 

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1. Bookchin, M. (1970). Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, with the Ecology Action East Manifesto and Toward an Ecological Solution. New York: Times Change Press.