On Thursday, Oscar de la Renta will launch a new addition to its Bella perfume line: Bella Soleil. Inspired by Dominican gardens, the floral scent will be available at major retailers like Macy’s. But even before its official launch, the scent is already available to order on a growing fragrance platform: Amazon.
Interparfums, Inc., which owns the fragrance license for brands such as Oscar de la Renta, MCM and Guess, began selling its perfumes on Amazon in 2021. Amazon has been courting premium beauty since it launched its prestige beauty platform in 2013, but a growing number of companies have seen the value in setting up their own storefronts on the platform in the years since 2020. In 2024 alone, more than 300 beauty brands joined Amazon’s premium beauty store. That includes fragrance brands.
“We are very open to being on Amazon,” said Interparfums chief commercial officer Hervé Bouillonnec. “You have a marketplace where you can find anything. So if you control your image [on Amazon], it’s much better.”
Fragrance was the undisputed star beauty category of 2024. According to Circana, U.S. sales of fragrance grew 12% in 2024. Meanwhile, major retailers like Sephora have named fragrance their highest growth category. But in contrast to its growth across the beauty sector, fragrance is growing more slowly on Amazon compared to categories like skin care as it faces hurdles like a lack of sampling opportunities.
“Amazon wouldn’t be able to be successful if it hadn’t been able to shift trust metrics for beauty consumers,” said Emily Safian-Demers, director of insights at e-commerce strategy group Front Row. “The biggest barrier to purchasing fragrance online is you can’t smell it first. If you haven’t gone to a physical store to test it out, it’s a no-go for a lot of people. They want to be able to smell it because it is such a unique and personal product in a way that skin care or even makeup isn’t.”
According to Front Row, skin-care sales grew on Amazon by 26% from 2023 to 2024, accounting for one-third of the platform’s overall beauty sales in 2024. Fragrance sales, meanwhile, grew by a more modest 14%. But joining Amazon is part of a bigger strategy than just boosting sales.
“What draws people to Amazon is also the reviews. They’re looking for what people say about the product,” said Safian-Demers. “So even if you’re not necessarily capturing all of your sales on Amazon, you can still generate interest and buzz from an Amazon presence.”
Safian-Demers said Amazon consumers often exist as part of a bigger ecosystem — they may discover a brand in person but purchase on Amazon or check reviews on Amazon before purchasing elsewhere. And searches for fragrance are growing faster than sales: Front Row data found that there were 1.1 million searches for “fragrance” in the beauty category on Amazon in 2024, a 35% increase from 2023 and a 97% increase from 2022
Creating an official Amazon storefront also means protecting a brand image from the gray market or unauthorized third-party sellers.
“Our objective with going to Amazon Luxury Beauty was to clean up the unauthorized sale of our products, some of which could have been counterfeit,” said Vicken Arslanian, founder and CEO of U.S. fragrance distributor Europerfumes. A number of brands in the Europerfumes portfolio, like Juliette Has a Gun and Xerjoff, are available on the platform. “By going on there ourselves, we’re able to better control what the consumer is getting and ensure they’re getting the proper brand with the proper prices, from the proper supply chain.”
Fragrances available on Amazon run the gamut, from a $14.99 bottle of Guess Seductive Dream to a $495 bottle of Creed Aventus. But it’s the mass and designer brands that have been especially successful. According to Front Row, Sol de Janeiro was the top-selling fragrance brand on Amazon in 2024. Rounding out the top five was Versace, the Arab perfume brand Lattafa, Armani and Victoria’s Secret. Sol de Janeiro declined Glossy’s request to comment.
Getting on Amazon can also offer a key path to meeting a growing fragrance consumer base: young men. Jean Paul Gaultier, whose classic ‘90s cologne Le Male has found a strong audience in Gen-Z men, was the ninth best-selling fragrance on Amazon in 2024, according to Front Row. Front Row also found that the growth of men’s fragrances is outpacing women’s, with men’s fragrance sales growing 19% year-over-year on Amazon compared to a 14% growth in women’s.
“When looking at the gender breakdown of beauty shoppers on Amazon, it’s about 50/50 men to women. When we look at specialty beauty stores, it’s more like one-third men to two-thirds women,” said Safian-Demers. “Those stores are very strongly marketed toward women and created for women. As a male stepping into those stores, it’s easy to see how they may feel out of place or uncomfortable, whereas there’s not that same stigma on Amazon.”
The seamless purchasing experience on Amazon or TikTok Shop may present a challenge to those more traditional beauty retailers. But Interparfums’ Bouillonnec believes buying online versus in-person or in traditional versus new retailers should not be viewed as a zero-sum game.
“The pie is getting bigger,” he said. “Macy’s, Ulta, Sephora — we do a lot of business with them on e-comm. And even if e-comm stabilized or [sales] became a bit lower than during Covid, we are still doing 25-30% of our business on e-comm with our partners. The share of the e-comm is big for them, too.”
Amazon is increasingly a destination for premium beauty consumers, with major brands like L’Oréal-owned Aesop and Estée Lauder-owned Too Faced all migrating to the platform in recent years. But while there still exists the stigma of selling a luxury product on Amazon — where consumers may also be buying toilet paper or laundry detergent — brands will go where they see their consumers and competitors flocking.
“Sometimes the challenge is to make brands understand that Amazon is a good tool for brand building and getting to the consumers,” said Bouillonnec. “Some fashion brands have been especially reluctant to go to Amazon, but that’s changing. Once they see their competitors getting there, they want to be part of it, too.”
