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“Nobody has the recipe to make a success. I have yet to see someone who’s able to strike one success after the other and predict the success,” said Renaud Salmon, who has served as chief creative officer at Omani fragrance brand Amouage since 2019. “That’s the beauty of perfumery, because it feels like a never-ending quest.”
Few brands have captivated the niche fragrance boom quite like Amouage. The luxury brand achieved $300 million in sales in the third quarter of 2025, equalling a 73% growth. That was after the brand reported a 60% growth in sales for the first half of 2025. And though Salmon claims not to have the exact recipe for success, his creations say otherwise.
Amouage’s Exceptional Extraits collection, which includes scents launched in 2024 and 2025, tripled its sales in Q3. But the brand’s leading creation remains the Guidance eau de parfum, a fruity and enveloping sandalwood creation known for its long-lasting trail, which Salmon created with Givaudan perfumer Quentin Bisch in 2023. According to Salmon, Guidance and its extrait flanker Guidance 46, released in 2024, account for a quarter of all Amouage fragrance bottles sold. Salmon and Bisch continued their collaboration with the launch of Decision and Existence in 2025.
“We benefit overall from the market dynamics. People are looking for fragrances that have specific characteristics, long-lasting, diffusive and so on,” said Salmon. “And people don’t want to spend crazy amounts of money for something that would be disappointing. And we have a good reputation from that point of view.” Amouage customers have shown they are willing to pay top dollar for the brand’s creations: The hit Guidance 46 extrait retails for $550 per 100-milliliter bottle, while collections like the 100% oil concentration attars retail for as much as $590 for a 12-milliliter bottle.
It’s those successes that made Amouage a worthy investment for L’Oréal. The French beauty conglomerate announced the acquisition of a minority stake in Amouage in February, a preclude to its bigger investment in luxury fragrance with the acquisition of Kering’s beauty portfolio in October.
“We can create even more,” Salmon said, in light of the L’Oréal investment. “We can dream even bigger, because we have the reassurance that what we do is probably the right thing to do. … None of what is happening is about telling us what to do.”
In addition to creating new fragrances, Amouage has expanded its brick-and-mortar footprint in 2025. The brand opened a flagship in New York’s Soho neighborhood in October, following its opening of a new boutique in Guangzhou in June and the remodeling of its Muscat flagship in March.
Salmon does not claim to know whether the fragrance boom that has demanded more stores and launches will hold in 2026. But he is interested in experimenting with aging perfumes in a manner akin to the wine industry, an endeavor that implies there will be ample eager fragrance consumers in the years to come.
“People are looking for emotions. People want to feel,” said Salmon. “In a world in which people feel less and less, our capacity to make people feel is going to, hopefully, keep on resonating.”
