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One afternoon earlier this month at a convention center in Hamburg, Germany, fragrance influencer Jeremy Fragrance runs out on stage dressed in all white and begins leading the crowd in a chant. “Kraft,” Fragrance yells (it’s German for “power”). The crowd yells it back. Minutes later, in the middle of being interviewed, Fragrance leaps from his seat and starts doing one-handed push-ups.
An onlooker turns to GQ: “People who act like this have something very wrong inside of them.”
In a world of algorithmically-optimized influencers and creators, Fragrance is more like a WWE wrestler. Getting, and maintaining, millions of followers on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—where he has 800,000 followers, six million followers, and two million subscribers, respectively—typically requires a certain level of polish. Especially if you’re making content about luxury products like designer perfumes. Fragrance’s vibes are deeply, almost uncomfortably, weird. But that’s a key part of his appeal: There is simply no way of knowing what you will see when you press play on one of his videos.
After his eyebrow-raising interview at the OMR Festival marketing conference (full disclosure: I was also speaking there, and in fact, had the difficult job of going on after him) Fragrance is swarmed by fans hoping for a selfie with him. He turns most of these selfies into vlogs. At one point, he grabs a fan’s phone, switches it to video, and asks the camera, “What’s the first fragrance that pops into your head?”
The Fragrance fandom—genuine, ironic, or something in between—has arrived at a moment when the world of viral stars and influencers has morphed into a fairly stable industry, commonly referred to as the creator economy. And unlike the increasingly grim world of digital media—which, it now appears, may be looked back at as a failed attempt to move traditional media online—creators like Fragrance have had a much easier time translating content that used to be locked behind glossy magazines into something that can succeed on chaotic, nonlinear social platforms.
“I’ve noticed that people respond the best to extreme energy,” he tells GQ between selfies.
The central question at the heart of the Jeremy Fragrance brand—one that perplexes his fans as much as it compels them to keep watching—is where Jeremy Fragrance the character ends and where Jeremy Fragrance the person begins.
“I decided to always be Jeremy Fragrance,” he says. “I’m [playing] myself as my own computer game character.”
Fragrance was born Daniel Sredzinski and later changed his name to Daniel Schütz. He joined a German boy band called Part Six in the late 2000s and adopted the stage name Jeremy Williams. After leaving Part Six, he eventually landed on YouTube, where he started posting about perfume and changed his name again, to Jeremy Fragrance.
Around 2021, he caught the attention of users on Reddit’s r/fragrance subreddit. They tried (and failed) to figure out what his deal was. He moved to Miami. He started making videos, ostensibly perfume reviews, that would slowly devolve into weird monologues about how he wants a girlfriend or masturbates without climaxing after working out to raise his sexual energy (many of those videos have since been deleted). More recently, he has launched a Kickstarter to design his own perfume and was formally invited to Pakistan by the country’s prime minister.
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Ryan Broderick
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