About Us

It started with a pretty simple thought: why has smelling good become so expensive?

We've always loved fragrances. There's something about finding a scent you really like that's hard to explain. It can remind you of a person or a place, change how you feel when you put it on, or simply give you that extra bit of confidence before you leave the house. But some of the fragrances we loved were costing £100, £200 or even more for one bottle. If you enjoy changing your fragrance depending on your mood, the occasion or the season, it gets expensive very quickly.

That's really where WHATS THE FRAGRANCE started. We wanted to create an alternative for people who love some of the world's best-known fragrances but don't necessarily want to pay designer prices every time they buy a bottle.

We're very open about what we do. Our fragrances are inspired by well-known scent profiles, but they are sold under our own brand, in our own bottles and with their own WHATS THE FRAGRANCE numbers. We're not trying to make fake designer perfumes or make our bottles look like somebody else's. The inspiration might be familiar, but the product you're buying is ours.

For us, keeping the price accessible doesn't mean finding the cheapest fragrance oil and putting it in a bottle. We've spent a lot of time testing different fragrance houses, comparing samples against the fragrances that inspired them and rejecting ones we weren't happy with. Some took longer to get right than others. We want the fragrances we eventually put our name on to be ones we're genuinely happy to sell.

Our fragrances are Eau de Parfum with a 20% fragrance oil concentration. Our fragrance sprays are Vegan Friendly and Cruelty Free, and all fragrances we sell are IFRA compliant and have a Cosmetic Product Safety Report (CPSR) completed by a Chartered Chemist. Making fragrance more affordable shouldn't mean cutting corners when it comes to quality or safety.

You'll probably notice that we use numbers instead of giving every fragrance an elaborate name. We did that deliberately. We wanted our fragrances to have their own identity rather than trying to recreate somebody else's branding. The idea is that eventually you stop thinking of it as the fragrance it was inspired by and start knowing it simply as your number.

Maybe it's the one you wear every day. Maybe it's the one you only wear when you go out. Maybe you have a few numbers and choose between them depending on how you feel that morning. That's exactly how we think fragrance should be enjoyed.

We don't think you should have to save your favourite fragrance because every spray feels expensive. We want people to be able to experiment, try something they wouldn't normally choose and have different fragrances for different parts of their life without spending hundreds of pounds every time.

And then there's the name.

Anyone who loves fragrance knows the moment. Someone walks past you, sits next to you or gives you a hug and they smell so good that eventually you have to ask:

"What's the fragrance?"

That question became our name because, ultimately, that's what we want our fragrances to do.

WHATS THE FRAGRANCE is an independent UK fragrance brand and we're still right at the beginning. We're not going to pretend we have decades of history behind us or make up a story that isn't there. We're building the brand now, and we want to build it properly - with good fragrances, fair prices and products that people genuinely enjoy wearing.

Hopefully one day someone stops you and asks what you're wearing.

When they do, just tell them your number.