Niche Perfume for Men

Niche began as the alternative to mass production: smaller houses, more selective shops and a narrower audience. The critic Luca Turin calls L'Artisan Parfumeur, founded in Paris in 1976, the first niche firm. Frédéric Malle took the idea further by putting the perfumer's name on the bottle, when most perfumers still worked unseen in their labs, as The Perfume Society tells it.

Indie lines sit a step further out: usually owned and run by the perfumer, and free to bottle scents the big commercial houses leave alone. For a perfumer the draw is room to experiment, away from the marketers and focus groups that Malle set out to escape.

Niche describes how a house makes and sells perfume, not how good a bottle is. Since the 2010s large groups have bought many niche houses, Estée Lauder among them with Frédéric Malle and Le Labo, and plenty now sit beside designer names in department stores. Malle himself worries that some very bad perfumes now arrive under the label.

A high price proves nothing either: one perfume writer told The Observer that good perfume does not have to be expensive. That is why every perfume here carries a verdict on how it smells, how long it lasts and what it costs, so you can judge the bottle rather than the label.

These perfumes were marketed to men, and that label is marketing too. The Guardian's beauty columnist has written that nothing in a scent decides who it is for, and that cues such as spice, smoke, wood and leather are learned. Many niche houses never assign a gender at all, so the unisex list has plenty more.