This Smells Like Shit. I Love It!

Why do hot people want to smell like poop?

and

Jun 24, 2025

As I went to unlock my bike, I saw the plumber struggling to get a massive hot water unit out of our building’s basement. I offered what feeble help I could muster before he turned to me and gave me a sniff. What are you wearing?

I love when this happens. In fact, recently I was the one to sniff and utter those magic words, when I hopped in a lyft, and the driver smelled like a rich smokey oud. He, delighted, revealed he kept vials of perfume in his dashboard, and dropped me off with little vial of an essence he recently imported.

Those of us who love scent are connected in an unexpected, invisible fan club. Brian Eno is one of us. Your plumber could be one of us, especially if you plumber is my plumber, who shared that he is partial to fragrances by Jan Barba. I, in turn, told him about my perpetual favorite, Bruno Fazzolari. It became a conversation about memory and association and taste, and it was over all before I had to unlock my bike and ride away.

But does love of fragrance ever go… too far? The brilliant Em Seely-Katz explores one of the most curious scent trends they’ve found. I like to commission articles between episodes, as a gift to you and a pleasure for me. So enjoy!

We, on the ever-Eurocentric global stage, are hardly more “liberated” than the schmucks captured in sepia photos a century ago. In the past few years of mounting evidence have congealed into a time-worn truth: perhaps now more than ever, hot people want to smell like poop.

A few months ago, a woman began to visit the niche perfume store I work at during lunch breaks from her nearby job in real estate. She’s striking, with copper hair past her shoulders and a face that looks simultaneously older and younger than I suspect is her actual age (mid 40s to early 50s, perhaps). Her opening words to me on the first of what would become a handful of repeat visits were: “I am looking for something poopy.”

Since the Covid-fueled “Perfume Boom” of the early 2020s, the world of niche fragrance has expanded so rapidly (largely thanks to TikTok) that very little territory has gone unexplored in the world of experimental olfactory art. You can now purchase perfume that smells like a burnt-out lightbulb, an imaginary global gluten crop infection, and perhaps most infamously, a putrid mix of “sweat, saliva, blood and sperm” in the form of Etat Libre D’Orange’s “Secretions Magnifique.” If the 2010s said, “I smell like a cupcake,” the 2020s ask: “What if I smelled like a freshly desecrated altar?” Short-form videos continue to circulate of brave souls sniffing a blotter, then clutching their nose and doubling over. Who would dare to wear such an offensive fragrance? Moreover, who would we as a society allow to smell stinky on purpose? This 2024 meme offers an answer to both questions:

A baseline aversion to the smell of feces makes sense as a protective measure against unwittingly exposing oneself to dangerous bacteria or parasites, but the societal fear of smelling like shit has far outpaced the frequency we’re exposed to the actual material in most of the urban world. But there’s another fear that we’re warding off with banishing the smell.

Recently on Sixteenth Minute (Of Fame), a podcast about “Internet Main Characters” from the past dozen years or so, host Jamie Loftus covered an incident that occurred last fall in which fragrance scholar Dr. Ally Louks found herself at the bottom of an alt-right internet comment dogpile after sharing her thesis, “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.” As per Loftus, “There are… smells we learn through experience to interpret as bad, whether this is for social or survival purposes, and this can lead to encouraging or helping to form any number of societally induced discriminations. Linked to our sense of smell is a strong tradition of classism, as well as racism and xenophobia.” Louks argues that poor and non-white people are held to much higher smell standards than more privileged folks, and that scents we associate with marginalized people are likely to scan as “gross,” as if that judgement could be considered objective. But that’s precisely what makes the scent so delightfully transgressive.

My queen, the sexy maybe-fortysomething who waltzed into this high end perfume store in search of shit, had the right idea. I rushed to show her Zoologist’s “Hyrax,” undeniably the poopiest scent we carry. She was pleased. And she was unwittingly part of a grand history.

That scent she purchased showcases a synthetic tribute to hyraceum, or “African stone,” a fermented and petrified melange of urine and feces from the marmot-like rodent, the hyrax. The material has now been used as a fixative in perfume for centuries, sticking fragrances to skin for hours (or days!) on end. In addition to its staying power, Hyraceum has a leathery, meaty quality that gives scents body and edge. Its heady, rich aroma hangs thick in the nostrils, as if one could feel its molecules coating the sinuses’ cilia. The cheeky creature rendered on the perfume’s bottle clues you in as to what you’ll experience upon first sniff: the farcical nature of what could easily be written off as a gimmick quickly sublimates into something far weirder than a simple gag.

I was lucky enough to get to chat with, Mandy Aftel, a master perfumer and iconic figure of natural fragrance art, and she insisted that “poopy” fragrances (usually featuring real or synthetic indole or skatole, compounds that give urine and feces their characteristic tang) have always been beloved by a diverse array of fragrance appreciators. I asked Aftel why she thinks fecal fragrances have recently become the domain of hot girls. “They’re sexy. They've always been sexy,” she told me matter-of-factly. “I think anything that's reminiscent of the human body, or just of the body period, speaks to us. We're animals at the core, and fragrances reminiscent of the impolite smells of the human body have always been captivating.”

Mandy Aftel and me in her garden

Most of Aftel’s fragrances contain some animalic component, often one replete with indole or skatole. I had never smelled non-synthetic animalic notes before, so visiting the her museum in Berkeley, the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, was a revelation: her hyraceum and castoreum (beaver secretions) were punchy and skanky, her ancient ambergris (whale excrement) was buttery and almost floral (I took some home), her civet (the musk of a rare breed of cat)… ok, that one made me gag with its unrepentant stench of fermenting indole.

Raw materials in Aftel’s garden

In Aftel’s words, poopy notes like those listed above are the “yang” to the “yin” of scents like jasmine, one of my favorite fragrances, and one that can also smell a bit like piss. . Aftel explained to me that “in the heavy florals, the putrid part is really what makes the floral part so beautiful. It's very metaphorical of life, how beauty is illuminated by things that are dirty.” If you smellwhite florals that are missing the poopy funk in the base, (Maison Crivelli’s “Tuberuse Astrale” for example) these florals can feel facile and flaccid, almost… sanitized. Like the repellent fumes of a freshly-cleaned toilet bowl, synthetically “clean” scents can feel uncanny—not human.

Aftel used the word “frisson” to describe the experience of indulging in a particularly indolic fragrance, referring to an experience of momentary activation, possibly resulting in goosebumps or chills. This sort of frisson is at the very heart of eroticism. Eros is defined, in both Greek mythology and Byung Chul-Han’s The Agony of Eros, by confusion, ambiguity, and the tension between the drive toward life (or reproduction) and the specter of death. Eros is what is a little dirty, a little dangerous, and what has been absolutely absent from sleek, friction-free, screen-focused society.

The early 2020s were dictated by the hegemonically obvious “clean girl” aesthetic, then we moved onto wanting to look and feel like food : the trajectory points toward decay as we transition from plasticine objects to perishables. Consider, as an alternative, the hot girl wearing poopy perfume. She isn’t a plasticine barbie who smells of clean white florals. She has depth. She isn’t just indulging in kink or irony—she’s aestheticizing her body’s inevitable decay, and making herself a walking memento mori.

For attractive women to dress up in beautiful outfits, to offer themselves up to men as a sex object, to perform the “sexy” facets of femininity—if no elements of tension are added to the mix, one might accidentally render themself completely neutered of genuine eroticism. Fragrance is a fairly accessible, straightforward, versatile ingredient with which to add the secret sauce to a relatively “safe” ensemble: perversion.

It’s a badge of honor to know you smell like shit and can still get laid. That’s not to say kink is absent from this trend. Scat play, golden showers, and olfactory humiliation all occupy the psychological terrain where disgust with decay loops back around into desire.

In an age of increasingly digitized experience, poop perfumes are insistently analog. They are messy, bodily, persistent. They cannot be scrubbed from your skin with a browser refresh. The fact that people line up for a sample of Secretions Magnifique even though most will recoil says something about our craving for edge, for authenticity, for scent as sensation rather than status as the perfume pendulum swings away from “scentmaxxing” teens and toward a more mystifying, mature compulsion.

A more exciting possibility is that if scent is how we announce our humanity, the rise of shit-smell is a protest against becoming sanitized, streamlined data ghosts. We’re bringing bowels back, baby.

Thanks Em! Follow them on their substack- it’s truly one of my favorite reads:

And please, if you live in New York, go vote today, and please consider ranking Zohran and Lander at the top. They’’re filling me with hope for the future in a way that I haven’t felt in years.