The World Is Starting to Discover African Fragrance

From Lagos to Accra, Dakar to Cape Town, a new generation of African fragrance houses is quietly attracting attention far beyond the continent. Most of us have not noticed yet.

Think about the last perfume you bought. Not one you were given, one you chose and paid for. Where was it made?
Most of us would say France. Some would say Dubai. Plenty would say they bought it from a shop in Ikeja and never thought about it again. Very few would say Accra, and almost nobody would say Maiduguri.

That is starting to look like an oversight.

There is a Nigerian house called Beguile operating across three continents. There is a woman in Maiduguri who took the incense her family burned every morning and evening and put it into a spray bottle. There is a house named after a nineteenth-century trader from the Niger Delta whose award-winning fragrance is built on green plantain. There is a perfumer in Cape Town working with myrrh that Himba women gather from fallen resin in northern Namibia.

These are not hobby projects.

Catherine Omai, a Nigerian perfumer, sells a fragrance called Contagious through Saks Fifth Avenue. Maya Njie has run her own perfume label out of London since 2016, and Liberty carries it. And in June, at an awards ceremony in Athens, two of the winning perfumes were ours.

So this is not a story about what might happen one day. The houses exist. The bottles ship. The awards have already been handed out. The only part still missing is that most of us have never heard about any of it.

Beguile‘s line, developed in Dubai and sold across its four markets. Photo: @beguilebyomaa

So how are people finding these brands?

Through a screen, mostly.

Every house in this article is niche. Designer fragrance is what a fashion label puts its name on and sells at volume. Niche is the smaller end, where a house will…