How the world suddenly decides what it wants to taste, wear — and smell
Taste rarely moves in a straight line. It drifts from one industry to another, picking up meanings as it goes. An ingredient appears first on a plate, then in a fashion image, then in a beauty campaign and, sooner or later, somewhere on the skin. By the time everyone agrees that something has become a trend, the more interesting phase has already happened: the moment when thousands of people, apparently independently, began wanting the same thing.
This is not new. Perfumery has always been particularly good at registering these cultural tremors. The marine fragrances of the 1990s captured an era fascinated by transparency, freshness and a synthetic idea of the ocean. Gourmands turned sugar, caramel and vanilla into legitimate perfume materials at precisely the moment when fragrance was loosening its old rules about what sophistication was supposed to smell like. Oud followed a different route, moving from a deeply established Middle Eastern tradition into the vocabulary of global luxury. More recently, pistachio and cherry have performed their own migrations across food, fashion, beauty and scent.
Then the world turned green.
Not botanical green in the old sense, nor the antiseptic green of “clean” beauty, but the intense, powdered green of matcha. For years it sat comfortably within specialist tea culture and Japanese food traditions; then, almost suddenly, it seemed to appear everywhere at once. Cafés built drinks around it, pastry chefs folded it into croissants and tiramisu, skincare brands borrowed its colour and associations, and fragrance began translating it into accords of bitter leaves, cream, woods and musk.
The easiest explanation is social media. It is also incomplete. Algorithms accelerate desire, but they rarely create it from nothing. The ingredients that become true cultural obsessions generally arrive carrying a set of meanings that the moment already wants. Matcha happened to be unusually well equipped.
Long before it became a latte, powdered tea was embedded in a ritual culture that prized concentration, precision and restraint. Its history in Japan passed through Buddhist practice, aristocratic display and, eventually, the radical refinement of the tea ceremony. By the sixteenth century, tea masters such as Sen no Rikyū had helped transform tea from a demonstration of wealth into something more subtle: luxury expressed through discipline, spareness and imperfection. Powerful men could leave richly decorated interiors and enter deliberately modest rooms to contemplate rough ceramics, bamboo and a bowl of green tea.
The idea feels oddly contemporary. Extreme sophistication disguising itself as simplicity is hardly foreign to modern luxury.
Even matcha’s colour, which now appears almost designed for a screen, is the result of a centuries-old agricultural technique. Tea plants intended for high-grade powdered tea are shaded before harvest, altering the chemistry of the leaf and contributing to the vivid green colour, umami and particular balance of bitterness associated with fine matcha. What looks almost digitally saturated is, in fact, the product of a method refined long before anyone had a feed to curate.
This helps explain why matcha was so ready for its second life. It possesses what most trends spend fortunes trying to manufacture: an immediately recognisable colour, a distinctive taste, a visible ritual and an existing mythology. It can signal wellness without being medicinal, indulgence without appearing entirely guilty, exoticism without being inaccessible. A bowl whisked slowly by hand can suggest discipline; an iced matcha with vanilla and strawberry can suggest dessert. The ingredient tolerates the contradiction beautifully.
Coffee, by comparison, has spent decades being associated with urgency. Matcha arrived carrying the opposite fantasy: deliberateness. The distinction is not strictly chemical — both contain caffeine — but consumer culture has never depended on chemistry alone. It depends on narrative. Matcha comes with gestures: measuring powder, adding water, whisking, watching foam rise. It gives the impression that consumption has been slowed down and made intentional. In an age obsessed with routines, rituals and optimised forms of self-care, this is an unusually powerful proposition.
Then demand met agriculture.
This is where the story becomes less decorative. The global appetite for matcha has grown much faster than the system that produces it can easily respond. Tea fields cannot be scaled like a software platform, and new production does not appear because a trend has gone viral. Plants require time; quality requires technique; weather still has a vote. The collision between rapidly manufactured desire and stubbornly physical agriculture is one of the more revealing features of modern taste. The internet can create appetite almost instantly. A tea plant remains indifferent to the speed of the algorithm.
By the time fragrance entered the matcha story, the ingredient was already doing far more cultural work than simply tasting good. It had become a colour, a mood, a signal of restraint, a form of comfort and a small badge of contemporary taste. Perfumery, which is exceptionally sensitive to these shifts, did what it often does: it translated the cultural idea into smell.
That translation is more interesting than it appears because “matcha” in a perfume is usually not a literal ingredient in the way a consumer might imagine. There is no conventional matcha essential oil waiting to be poured directly into a formula. The effect must be constructed. A perfumer may build the impression from green notes, tea facets, mate, woods, musks, powdery materials, bitter nuances or creamy elements, depending on which version of matcha is being evoked.
And there are now many versions.
For one person, matcha means dry powder, bitterness and cut grass. For another, it means a sweet latte with oat milk. Someone who encountered it first in Kyoto may associate it with austerity and ceremony; someone who discovered it in a café in Brooklyn may think of vanilla foam and translucent plastic cups. The ingredient no longer possesses a single olfactory identity because culturally it no longer possesses a single identity either.
This is exactly why trends are often misunderstood. Once several brands or creators begin working with the same ingredient, the immediate accusation is imitation. Occasionally that is justified. But creative industries also move in parallel because their participants inhabit the same cultural atmosphere. Designers, chefs, perfumers, photographers and consumers are exposed to the same colours, destinations, ingredients, anxieties and aspirations. They can arrive at related ideas without conspiring to do so.
Culture synchronises people.
The better question is not who used matcha first, but what anyone has to say about it once everyone has noticed it. There is an enormous difference between recognising a cultural moment and merely attaching a fashionable word to a product. The first can produce something lasting. The second is usually how a trend begins to die.
All trends eventually face that problem. Something begins as unfamiliar, becomes desirable, then recognisable, then ubiquitous. Repetition gradually strips away the surprise that made it compelling in the first place. Sometimes the ingredient disappears with the cycle; sometimes it survives and enters the permanent vocabulary. Vanilla has done this repeatedly. Oud has done it. Matcha may eventually do the same.
For now, however, its journey is unusually revealing. A powdered tea carried into Japanese religious culture centuries ago became part of elite ritual, then an emblem of refined simplicity, then an agricultural speciality, then a global wellness drink, an algorithmic colour, a supply-chain problem and, finally, an imaginary smell reconstructed by perfumers.
That is quite a career for a leaf.
Perhaps this is what fragrance trends tell us better than most trends do. We like to imagine that our noses make private, independent decisions. In reality, they are listening to everything around them: food, fashion, economics, travel, technology, aspiration and memory.
Every generation has its powder.
This one happens to be green.
