Style Theory: I Tested WEIRD TikTok Perfume! (Missing Person Perfume)

Can one perfume actually make seven different people remember a lost loved one? Today we're putting that to the test, to see if this powerful new perfume is as magical as it claims, or whether all we're smelling is a big ol' pile of B.S. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Style Theory, where today, love is in the air, or is it? You see, the target of today's stylish over-analysis is an unsuspecting little perfume. Yep, a bottle of perfume that's the latest on TikTok's too-good-to-be-true product list, the Missing Person Perfume by Fleur. You see, unlike a normal perfume, which would be popular because it, you know, smells nice, this one advertises that it has a magical quality, that it brings back memories of people that you miss. There are hundreds of videos of people not just talking about how good this stuff smells, but talking about how it moved them to tears. I mean, just take a look at these reactions. Well, it smells like a person that you love and you miss. Oh my god, I'm gonna cry! Why is this making me emotional? You know when you're cuddling with someone that you really love, you're, like, nuzzled up in their chest and you look up at them? It smells like that. Those are some pretty powerful testimonials. This must be some sort of super perfume. That said, there are also testimonials that are happening on TikTok. Now, I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't believe everything you see online because people are just over-exaggerating for the views, but, uh, yeah, I'm kinda definitely saying that people over-exaggerate their reactions online for the views. Seeing these videos, as a logical person, it's hard to imagine that a perfume can literally evoke tears in seconds after sniffing, let alone remind multiple different people of multiple different special someones that they loved this much, right? But apparently, that's what Fleur's Missing Person Perfume claims to do. As its website states, it's, quote, a delicate yet addictive fragrance that evokes the lingering scent of your lover's skin. And its description on Sephora goes one more, saying, quote, If nude were a perfume, then this would be it. Let's just say that the smell of nude, to me, is not something you want to advertise. Oh, this is the smell of nude! The smell of nude, for me, is the smell of I need to go into the shower. Some of us just have different connotations around the word nude, alright? All joking aside, though, obviously, there are lots of questions here. Like, when they say I'm supposed to be reminded of someone I love, does this mean that me, someone who's been married for over a decade, would smell, what, my wife, Stephanie? The person that I'm already living with on a daily basis? Or is it like a perfume that makes me think of someone I dated before that? Cause, spoiler alert, I only really dated four girls in my life, and two of them were in elementary school. Some tells me I'm not gonna be reminded of my 10-year-old crush, Rachel, in our romantic juice box rendezvous on the school playground. In short, I just don't buy this thing. Perfume is just one of those things that seems to promise a lot in their commercials. Romantic trysts involving chess. Jumping off dangerous piers and then not being able to swim. Wearing billowy dresses in all the wrong places. And each and every time, the scents don't deliver. But hey, I've been surprised by these episodes in the past, so I'm gonna try it. You got me, TikTok. I ordered your perfume, even though its name only reminds me of reruns of Law & Order airing on TBS. Today, I'm gonna be putting your missing person to the test. And you can be sure that these are unbiased opinions, cause, let's be honest, I don't have myself an expert track record when it comes to scents. Tell you what this is reminding me of. It used to be my thing when I was a kid, when I would go to the mall with my family all the time. Maybe you don't remember this, but back in the day, they used to dry and hand away like little cards, little white cards that had the different smells attached to it, so that way you could smell all the different perfumes and be like, ooh, that's good. I called them the stinky cards, and so I would just go around collecting the stinky cards. So today, let's sniff some stinky cards and get to reminiscing. Okay, so right off the bat, the box tells you what mix of scents we should be experiencing. The different notes. So these are the notes that I'm supposed to experience. The top note, the heart note, and the base, hmm. I'm assuming what, does the top is what I smell first, heart is like a couple minutes in, and then base is like what everything's built off of. Tell me if I'm right, me after the fact. Right you are, me. Perfume scents change and develop after they're first sprayed. The first to hit your nose are the top notes. These typically fade within the first 5 to 15 minutes after use. Heart notes are the next, and make up the core of the perfume experience, around 70% of the full scent. They're also built to last much longer, starting to appear after 20 minutes, and lingering for anywhere between 1 to 4 hours. Finally, you have yourself the base notes, which only start to come out after about 30 minutes, and last for up to 6 hours. Now, because all of the reactions online show an immediate response, just spritz and cry, it tells me that people are only getting the feels when experiencing those top two levels, the top and heart set of notes. So then, what are those scents, and why are they so triggering? All right, so the top note here is skin musk. Not to be confused with their brother Elon. Bergamot nectar and sheer jasmine. Heart, fresh cyclamen. Thank goodness, because I hate the smell of like overripe cyclamen. The worst. Neroli blossom and orange flower. And finally, the base. Sandalwood, classic sandalwood. Australia oil, blonde wood, and white musk. Most of these are pretty run-of-the-mill perfume smells, but the one that made me raise an eyebrow was skin musk. Musk is a natural scent given off by animals to attract a mate. Don't worry, you're not going to be attracting any female deer or anything when you're wearing this perfume. Nowadays, perfumers use synthetic chemicals with extremely long names to add to that dose of animalistic seduction. So, with that out of the way, let's see if our sniffers were able to tell any of this stuff. After Style Theory creative director Amy gently unboxed the perfume for us, No. she inhaled that sweet aroma and gave us her first emotional reaction. Needless to say, we decided we should probably get ourselves a second opinion. So we called in some backup. Sitting our complete North Carolina strike force down on the old couch to put to the test what exactly their nose knows. Energy drink junkie Rachel, singing in the shower Josiah, Michigan grandpa Sam, I like Texas toast Justin, and then obviously Steph, Amy, and myself. One, two, three, and. Now, let me be clear. Our team was not prompted ahead of time about what was in the perfume. They just knew that it might remind them of someone from their past. We didn't specify who though. We decided that in a professional environment, probably not wise to tell them they might be smelling the lingering scent of their lover's skin. But hey, if that's what came to mind for them, awesome. Point proven for the perfume. So, did it work? Well, let's just say that our reactions were a bit inconsistent. So I like this. It's subtle. It's, it's kind of strong smell. Like I said, we were a bit divided. But then there were some things that we definitely agreed on. It's not overly floral. And even though this has a hint of floral in it, it's very muted. But like a little bit floral. I get the floral. This kind of smells florally maybe. So we all agreed it was floral until of course we didn't. Oh, for some reason I got a little like citrus on there. It's very fruity. It's fruitier than I expected. Immediately it became clear how hard it was going to be to articulate the smell of this because it didn't associate strongly with any known smell in our repertoires. Instead of describing what it was, more often than not it was easier for people to describe what it wasn't. I'm having a hard time pinpointing what this reminds me of, if anything. Because it's not really drawing me to any specific one smell. It's hard to specifically label what it is. It kind of feels very, very broad and general smell. It's not like a super overpowering one note. It's more of a general blended Swedish kind of smell. Not Swedish. Not like from the Nordics. Sweet-ish kind of smell. It has like a very vague potpourri vibe to me. In summary, we got flowers, but also not. We got that it was strong, except when it wasn't. We got practically everything, except for anyone indicating that it smelled to them like a person they remembered. Skin Musk, despite being one of those initial top notes, didn't seem to come through for any of us. It's already a bit of a blow on their claims that this is the scent of a lover's skin. When I think of Skin Musk, I think of something that is going to be like deeper and, you know, like a heartier smell. Something that, you know, Musk. It just has that, like, the word Musk just has a very strong scent reaction to it. I'm not getting any of that. So what did the perfume remind us of? Well, our answers were pretty wild, and I'm about to get to those right after I mention our sponsor for today's episode, Scentbird. For those of you not in the knows, Scentbird is a fragrance subscription service that brings perfume and cologne to you. Going to a store and spraying hundreds of perfumes or colognes is impossible, and eventually it just smells gross. You're less likely to find what you want, and every bottle is almost always costing you $100, at which point you're committed to smelling like one thing for the next year, or feeling guilty that you're not using that stuff. Scentbird changes how you think about the way you smell, though. You choose a new designer fragrance from a huge selection of perfumes, colognes, and unisex scents for only $17 a month. And these aren't your teeny tiny beauty store samples, either. Scentbird sends you a 30-day supply so you can really test out your selection. Scentbird was great enough to send our office not just one, but three fragrances to try out. Dylan Blue Pour Homme by Versace, which smells like a Mediterranean vacation. Guilty Cologne Pour Homme by Gucci, which is like a masculine lemon and lavender experience. And Stephanie's personal pick, Prada La Femme by Prada, which is like a spicier version of vanilla that has mysteriously disappeared from the office. Steph? Steph? Nope, she's gone. But hey, that's fine. Perfume theft is now okay because Scentbird will send me a new smell next month. Right now, if you go to Scentbird.com and use the code STYLETHEORY, you'll get 55% off your first month of Scentbird. 55% off. That is over half. So make sure that you go to Scentbird.com, S-C-E-N-T-B-I-R-D.com, and use the code S-T-Y-L-E-T-H-E-O-R-Y to start making some new scent memories today with the help of Scentbird. And now we return to our test. When we last left off, we had officially crossed that scent of nude claim off the list. But here's the thing. While we may have been missing the skin musk of it all, it certainly did trigger some memories in our sniffers. Just, uh, not the one that Fleur was advertising. So you know when it's like the spring sale past Bath & Body Works and they have all of their spring candles outside? You walk into a solid wall of semi-floral, very medicinal smells? That's what this smells like. I mean, don't get me wrong. I am passionate about a solid trip to the old Bath & Body Works. I just don't love it, love it in that sort of way. So what about our shower pro, Josiah? He just got married this year. He probably has some great scent associations, right? And there's a strange scent that takes me back to Universal Orlando. That's what it reminds me of. There's a lot of notes of citrus. There weren't a lot of people in my life, I think, that wore perfume. I think the only person who really wore, like, perfumes was my sister. But this doesn't really smell like her, I think. Okay, so we got one vote for Universal Orlando and one vote for Not Sister. That's when things started to skew a bit older. Oh, yeah. The first person that this makes me think of is definitely my grandmother. She didn't even, I don't think, necessarily wear perfume, but she had a whole bunch of perfumes in her room. The grandkids would go in there and we'd, like, spray a bunch of them. And I think, like, the median smell that came out of all of those grandma perfumes being sprayed together was basically this scent. Suddenly, the theme of grandma's house started to come on strong, real strong. If I had to associate it most with an archetype, it would probably be, like, a mom or a grandma. To be frank, it's like an old lady smell. It reminds me of old lady. I am getting a little grandma. It's very fruity. My grandma is a Chanel No. 5 woman. And so I think it's similar to that in the profile, but it is a little bit different. So it's not exactly what my grandma wears. I do like it, though. It smells good. So across the board, our team did report that this perfume took them back, just not to where it was advertised, unless everyone's secret lover is actually their grandma. I mean, I know our team has some niche interests, but that was not one that I saw coming. Now, the premise of smell-activating memories is a very real thing. Our ability to do this is a special kind of human superpower known as the Proust effect, named after Marcel Proust, who wasn't a scientist, but rather a novelist. He wrote a book called Swan's Way, where the protagonist describes eating a madeleine, a bland little French cookie, and dipping it in his tea. And the smell and taste of that cookie brings back, quote, a flood of memories. No joke, this is actually one of Steph's favorite books, because she is a literature snob. And whenever we eat or smell something random that makes us feel nostalgic, we always say, Ah, it's like Proust's madeleine. A flood of memories. It is a whole nerdy thing between the two of us. So welcome to the lame memes that make our relationship go. Literally the most obscure inside jokes that you can imagine. Anyway, there's a real science behind the idea of smell-triggering memories. While we're still working to fully understand the connection, research about scent and memory shows that when a scent enters your nose, the neurons that make up your nose's receptor cells sends a signal to the brain's scent station, known as the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb's connected to the amygdala and the hippocampus, which, if they sound important, well, that's because they are. Those are both special areas of your brain. The amygdala for emotional processing, and the hippocampus for memory, including long-term memory. MRI scans show that when the olfactory bulb is triggered, the amygdala and hippocampal areas of the brain light up even more than when people are shown visual images. Meaning that memories of smell are stronger than memories of the things that you see. And that remains to be the case even years after you've smelled something. So while missing person may not be able to make people think of their ex, it can still trigger plenty of memories. And the memory that most of the team was triggered by actually ended up making a lot of sense. If you remember back to Rachel's observation from a minute ago, I am getting a little grandma. My grandma is a Chanel No. 5 woman, and so I think it's similar to that in the profile. She's pretty astute. As it turns out, our team's grandparents are all within about a decade of each other based on age. And based on the demographics, a lot of them would have been shopping for perfumes at similar times in their lives. Picking their signature scents between the late 50s and early 70s. During that time, perfumes like Chanel No. 5, Chantilly by Hubigant, and Chalamar by Guerlain were some of the most popular scents on the market. And wouldn't you know it, they all contained some very familiar notes. Jasmine, citrus, bergamot, and even neroli. Just like the top and heart notes of missing person. And weirdly, this might be more related to how the scent was created than we realized. Chriselle Lim, one of the minds behind this product, said, It's an interesting quote. I would say that she actually achieved that for a lot of the people who smelled the scent over here. I mean, what's more safe and comforting than being a kid in your grandma's house? My grandma didn't really wear perfume, so it didn't bring up those memories for me specifically. But I was also one of the people on the team who didn't have that grandma vibe. So I guess it checks out. That said, something else started to happen when I sat around with this perfume for a while. So this scent is supposed to remind me of someone or a lost lover or someone from my past? No. And here's the thing now, as I think about like, oh, the people in my life, and does it remind me of them? I'm like, oh, did that person wear something like that that one time? The answer is no, but my mind is trying to concoct memories, like it's falsely creative memories of like, oh yeah, maybe they wore that thing that one time way back, but this wasn't that scent. It's tricking me, playing with my mind. And that right there is the big twist of this whole marketing campaign. Missing Persons' entire brand is built around a tactic known as placebo marketing, where the setup of our expectations shape how we actually interact with a product. If we're told that this perfume is going to smell like someone that we love and miss, our brains are going to start to convince us that that's what's happening, whether it's true or not. That means that our TikTokers, well, yeah, they might have just been playing it up. They might have also just been falling prey to their brain's own ability to convince them that they really did miss someone when they smelled the perfume. Famous examples of placebo marketing can be seen everywhere, from medicine to soap. One common place that placebo marketing comes into play is wine. A really common experiment is to pour people two glasses of wine and tell them that one costs $10 a bottle and the other costs $100. People will tend to imagine that whichever wine you say is more expensive tastes better because their brain is telling them that the more expensive one must be the tastier one. Another example is Dove, who did an experiment with a fake product called a beauty patch, all meant to help improve women's self-image and confidence. The patch itself was just a placebo. It had no actual medical use. Over the course of the experiment, though, the women felt more confident and more beautiful, and it was all because their brain believed it. They used the experiment for good, to show that looking good and feeling good are mostly all in your head. But regardless of the intention, it's all about using our brain's own functioning against us, and missing person is no different. So is missing person worth the hype? No, not really. Will I be wearing it? Probably not. I don't really want people smelling me and thinking of their grandma, though I will say thinking of Universal Orlando, smelling like stale popcorn or something, that might be okay. And even though it works as a TikTok trend, the fact that you're wearing perfume designed to make people think of someone who's not you, probably doesn't bode well for the long-term life of the product. While the smell was fine, and there's nothing wrong with someone buying it and wearing it, if you're looking to conjure up memories of your long-lost lover, you might want to try something else, like stalking them on Facebook. But hey, that's just a theory. Seriously, though, don't actually stalk people on Facebook. A style theory. Keep looking sharp. And thank you once again to the sponsor of today's episode, Scentbird. Remember to head on over to Scentbird.com and use the code STYLETHEORY for 55% off your first month. All that information is down in the description. And hey, if you're not ready to end your style binge watch just yet, check out the box on the left to find out if UV clothing is really a bright idea. Or slam the box on the right to find out how much lipstick you're really eating in your lifetime. It is gonna blow your mind. And as always, I'll see you next time.