Perfume boom, quiet rooms: why the smartest counters are turning the volume down

I love a fragrance counter that respects my nose. The splashiest news this season isn’t a neon launch or a celebrity flanker, it’s a quiet pivot. Liberty expanded its fragrance footprint and in 2024 opened a purposefully low-tech Fragrance Lounge tucked away from the main floor. Translation for perfume people like me: fewer screens, more skin time.

This isn’t an outlier. In September, Nordstrom revamped the beauty floor at its New York City flagship with an expanded fragrance offer. More space is nice, but space without curation is just noise. The interesting play here is intimacy. When a retailer creates a room where you can switch off the retail hum, the juice can finally do the talking.

Here’s why it matters:

• Low-tech means less olfactory fatigue. Blotters, patience, skin. That’s how you actually meet a scent.
• Intimate zones favor discovery of quieter categories like skin-scent musks, airy florals, and resinous ambers that get bulldozed by loud mall projectors.
• Staff can guide, not sell. A lounge setup nudges conversation toward materials, structure, and evolution on skin.

Liberty London is also taking its in-house perfume line across the Atlantic. I’m watching that closely. An in-house brand only works if it’s not just margin in a bottle. The lounge suggests they know that. If they let the compositions breathe, give them context, and resist the urge to chase TikTok projection wars, they might actually win noses, not just wallets.

A small provocation for my fellow shoppers: if you need a playlist and a ring light to “get” a fragrance, maybe you don’t. Sit. Smell. Walk away. Come back. Retailers building calm, low-tech fragrance rooms are quietly telling us to trust our senses again.

If the boom keeps booming, I hope more stores follow Liberty and Nordstrom into thoughtful, human-scale perfume spaces. Fewer fireworks, more afterglow. That’s how real perfume lovers fall in love.