Japan's fragrance market: Why a nation of scent is not a nation of perfume

By Cosmetic Science

Japan is a nation of scent, but not yet a nation of perfume. It is home to Takasago, one of the world's ten largest flavour and fragrance houses and a leading player in Asia.

Yet its fine fragrance market was worth just 57.5 billion yen (about US$360 million) in 2024, according to Fuji Keizai: less than 2% of a cosmetics market worth 3.2 trillion yen (about US$20 billion).

In a 2026 MyVoice survey of over 11,000 people, only 14% had worn perfume in the past year. Japan's business press calls the country a "perfume desert".

So where does the scent go? For anyone formulating for Japan, the answer is the key.

Japan's interest in fragrance runs deep. Incense arrived with Buddhism in the sixth century, and by the fifteenth it had developed into kodo, "the way of incense", in which practitioners speak of "listening" to the wood, not smelling it.

That habit of drawing close and paying quiet attention still shapes how Japanese people relate to scent.

Today, fragrance in Japan lives mainly in the bathroom and the laundry: shampoo, hair oil, body wash, hand cream, bath additives and fabric softener.

Drugstore shelves are lined with scented products of every kind. Scent also follows the calendar: cherry blossom in spring, citrus in summer, yuzu and hinoki cypress in winter.

Each autumn kinmokusei, the orange osmanthus that blooms along city streets for about two weeks, turns up in limited-edition hair oils, body mists and softeners that vanish with the season.

Laundry detergent and fabric softener shelves in a Japanese drugstore
Image: © beeboys – stock.adobe.com

Japan's scented everyday products have one thing in common: their fragrance signals cleanliness, not personality. The country is humid, its cities are dense, and people spend their days at close quarters on trains and in offices.

A nightly soak in the bath is the norm, and "clean" has long meant almost odourless. Fragrance is therefore less a form of self-expression than a matter of good manners. Yoshika Sekine, a Tokai University chemist who studies skin gas, calls the urge to erase one's own body odour so as not to bother others a "nuisance-avoidance" mindset.

In practice, fragrance in Japan has to work without being noticed. Masking a bad smell with a stronger one creates another nuisance.

Japanese companies have responded with ways to control odour without adding much scent. Takasago screens fragrance materials against the roughly 400 human olfactory receptors to find those that block the receptor for a specific malodour, such as the 2-nonenal of ageing body odour (Cosmetic Science, February 2026).

Another approach blends the remaining off-notes into a faint, pleasant accord instead of covering them. Kao has developed a platform that analyses all 400 or so receptors at once. Rohto has reported an odourless ingredient that turns into a sweet-smelling lactone on the skin while reducing the acids behind sour odours.

The brief is the same whatever the product: a subtle scent at close range, and no trace of body odour.

Morning commuters in Tokyo
Image: © paru – stock.adobe.com

Yet green shoots are appearing in the perfume desert. Fine fragrance grew 15% in 2024, its second consecutive year of double-digit growth. Fuji Keizai cites first-time users drawn in by social media as one driver. In a Mynavi survey of 301 single working adults aged 23 to 28, three in four owned a perfume, and "every day" was the most common frequency of use.

What they choose is revealing. In a survey of 606 people by a Gen Z marketing agency, the most popular fragrance types were soap and citrus. Perfume is growing not by breaking etiquette but, once again, by entering through the "clean" door. What has changed is whose scent it is: a fabric softener scents the whole household, whereas a bottle of perfume belongs to one person.

The lesson for brands and suppliers is that Japan is not a small fragrance market but one where scent is distributed differently. Measured by the perfume bottle, it is a desert. Measured by scented personal care, it is one of the world's most demanding markets. Companies that succeed here see restraint not as a constraint but as the seed of new development.

Keen on exploring fragrance? Visit the Fragrance Zone at in-cosmetics Asia

Cosmetic Science Editorial Team

Cosmetic Science is Japan's only specialist magazine dedicated to cosmetic research and development, published monthly in print and digital editions. Each themed issue features research papers from Japan's cosmetic science community, and its content is shaped by an editorial advisory board of senior R&D leaders from leading companies including Shiseido, KOSÉ, Kao, POLA, FANCL and L'Oréal Japan. Our articles for this blog are written in rotation by editors who, in creating the magazine's content, are in regular contact with cosmetic researchers across Japan.

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