Balwinder Rolley began working in fragrance 25 years ago. Scents built around sweet, edible notes rarely survived a meeting with Asian clients. Vanilla, toffee and chocolate were too sweet, too heavy or unsuitable for the local climate and consumer preferences, she recalled.

Today, unique requests like pandan cake, onde-onde and kue lapis from Indonesia or mango sticky rice are getting popular. 

“In the past, trends largely came from the West,” she told Inside Retail. “Today, we’re increasingly seeing influence coming from the East.”

Rolley is general manager for Asia Pacific at Eurofragance, a Barcelona-based fragrance house that creates scents for other companies’ perfumes, shower gels, detergents and air fresheners. Suppliers like it rarely appear on a label, but they see a brand’s brief before the product exists, which makes them an early read on where consumer taste is heading.

The main driver of this change is a generational shift. In Asia, millennials and Gen Z are increasingly driving fragrance spending, Rolley said, and they look at products differently from their parents. They want something distinctive, good value and a story that feels personal. That has opened the door to local brands offering decent quality at prices that suit Asian wallets.

Where these shoppers buy matters as much as what they buy. Fragrance was once sold mainly through supermarkets and boutiques. It now increasingly sells through TikTok, Xiaohongshu, WeChat and Instagram, where a new label can reach buyers without first winning shelf space and where influencers carry more weight than big-budget campaigns.

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