Jeremy Fragrance is probably the best-known perfume influencer in Germany. Yes, perfume influencers. Sounds weird at first, because unlike clothing, hotels or furniture, you can’t see the smell of a perfume. You can hold up the bottle and spray yourself with it (Fagrance usually does it five times: twice behind each ear, twice on each side of the collar, and once on the back of the head) — but that’s pretty much it.
Nevertheless, the 34-year-old from Oldenburg has more than nine million followers on Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram. That’s less because of the perfume than because of the unmistakable brand he created. Fragrance performs with an insane energy. Even if he’s just standing in front of his shelf, filled with hundreds of bottles, and explaining which fragrances are suitable for a date and which are suitable for the office, he does it with an incredible ego – and always in his “signature look”: a suit like that knows that Master Proper will be jealous at the sight of him.
Fragrance, whose real name is Daniel Sredzinski, has no classic training as a perfumer, apparently he simply has the right nose – and has immediately declared himself number one in the perfume world. He’s good at it too, accurately describing a fragrance’s top notes and quality, even often able to guess the perfumes applied by others. People want to buy him for genuinely believing in that “I’m Number One” mentality.
Fragrance makes no secret of the fact that wealth is important to him. He lives luxuriously, has bought an apartment in Miami, a red Ferrari and a gold Rolex. Childhood dreams that he fulfilled, he says. Well, at least he leaves it at a Rolex and a Ferrari. He recently made it public in a Sat-1 report that his childhood was not entirely rosy. He comes from a modest background, his father was violent, so his mother got divorced early. He tries to downplay the fact that everyone has had to go through something at a young age anyway.
Only scents in the nose?
Fragrance publishes videos on Tiktok in which he, often dressed only in white swimming trunks, dances wildly and sprays perfume in large quantities. With a Cheshire Cat grimace, he shouts his favorite mantra “Power!” into the camera. Also because of the slightly disturbing Jim Carrey-in-manic-role vibes, his followers maliciously speculate in the comments whether he is taking drugs.
He denies the drug allegations, saying he’s had this energy since he was little. As an adolescent he lived it out as a dancer in the school theater and then at the Oldenburg State Theater.
In the analogue world, Fragrance has recently made a calmer impression. On the reality show Celebrity Big Brother, he fasted the entire time and yelled surprisingly little. He was polite, seemed almost vulnerable – and even insults didn’t bother him.
The hyped Tiktok persona is not well received by his YouTube community, which is noticeable in the comments. In addition, his newer YouTube videos seem unusually sloppily produced: he rattles off his text, giving the camera too little time to focus on the bottle labels. And the charisma is missing: Fragrance looks tired, almost sad. He claps half-heartedly and turns around his own axis, his classic “move” – all without the usual power. As if he were caught in the Youtuber’s hamster wheel, doomed to find new packaging for the same content every day, even if you might not want to.
Almost two weeks ago, the old fragrance reappeared: Aldi published a commercial with it, in which it draws attention to the best fragrance in the world: fresh bread. Are groceries the new market niche, the next step when the role of the snowed-in perfumer has had its day? We’ll probably see it.