My first perfume swap party took place in late February 2024 inside a packed, hot-pink-walled art gallery in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood. I squeezed into the room, which was lined with photos of cult-classic perfumes from the early ’00s, shot by artist Elizabeth Renstrom of @basenote_bitch, and placed a full bottle of DKNY Be Delicious Orchard St. on a table already crowded with fragrance. Vials from well-known houses, like Giorgio Armani, Chanel, and Frederic Malle, immediately caught my eye, plus bottles from more obscure labels that I hadn’t yet smelled. Hosted by Renstrom and Perfume Room podcast host Emma Vernon at Olfactory Art Keller, the swap had just two rules: Pay a $10 admission fee, and arrive with a perfume to give away that is at least 80% full. From there, you could place your unwanted bottle on the table and swap it for another scent that sparked your interest.
Surrounded by fellow fragrance enthusiasts, I felt a mounting sense of excitement that I had never experienced when shopping in a department store or boutique. I could smell and spray with abandon, without the pressure to drop $100 or more on a scent I had just sampled. The swap gave me a thrill similar to thrifting, only instead of combing through racks of vintage Levi’s and slip dresses, I was sorting through bottles of eau de toilettes and extraits. I left with a baby pink bottle of a now discontinued Nanette Lepore perfume and HC7 Bergamota from Perfumérica, a Mexico City–based brand that’s almost impossible to find in stores in the US.
While #PerfumeTok, a hashtag with around 1 million posts on TikTok, is one of my go-to methods for discovering fragrance trends, no amount of vocal or written description can stand in for the experience of actually smelling a perfume. As of mid-June 2025, there have been nearly 4,000 new perfumes launched, according to fragrance database Parfumo. That evens out to about 25 perfumes per day. Swaps help demystify the process of finding a signature scent, without feeding into the urge to blind-buy every bottle or sample set that appears on your For You page.
“I feel like a perfume swap brings the fun of spontaneous conversation into the real world and creates a two-way chat instead of passive consumption,” says Asia Grant, perfumer and host of Scent Social Club, an “fragrance tour” company. “Without any brand representatives or paid influencers in a room, everyone can enjoy feeling equal and honest in their passion for perfume,” says Jessica Murphy, a fragrance writer and art historian who creates scented museum tours. “It’s a very democratic, low-pressure space.”
According to Murphy, the concept of fragrance swapping isn’t exactly new. “In many ways, these swap events remind me of the swapping culture of the online message boards in the ’00s,” she says. “We listed our swap items online, arranged one-on-one trades, and mailed little packages to each other. Brands and e-commerce sites weren’t selling samples yet, and decant services didn’t even exist, so we created our own aromatic economy.”
