One afternoon earlier this month at a convention center in Hamburg, Germany, fragrance influencer Jeremy Fragrance runs out on stage dressed in all white and begins leading the crowd in a chant. “Kraft,” Fragrance yells (it’s German for “power”). The crowd yells it back. Minutes later, in the middle of being interviewed, Fragrance leaps from his seat and starts doing one-handed push-ups.
An onlooker turns to GQ: “People who act like this have something very wrong inside of them.”
In a world of algorithmically-optimized influencers and creators, Fragrance is more like a WWE wrestler. Getting, and maintaining, millions of followers on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—where he has 800,000 followers, six million followers, and two million subscribers, respectively—typically requires a certain level of polish. Especially if you’re making content about luxury products like designer perfumes. Fragrance’s vibes are deeply, almost uncomfortably, weird. But that’s a key part of his appeal: There is simply no way of knowing what you will see when you press play on one of his videos.
After his eyebrow-raising interview at the OMR Festival marketing conference (full disclosure: I was also speaking there, and in fact, had the difficult job of going on after him) Fragrance is swarmed by fans hoping for a selfie with him. He turns most of these selfies into vlogs. At one point, he grabs a fan’s phone, switches it to video, and asks the camera, “What’s the first fragrance that pops into your head?”
The Fragrance fandom—genuine, ironic, or something in between—has arrived at a moment when the world of viral stars and influencers has morphed into a fairly stable industry, commonly referred to as the creator economy. And unlike the increasingly grim world of digital media—which, it now appears, may be looked back at as a failed attempt to move traditional media online—creators like Fragrance have had a much easier time translating content that used to be locked behind glossy magazines into something that can succeed on chaotic, nonlinear social platforms.
“I’ve noticed that people respond the best to extreme energy,” he tells GQ between selfies.
The central question at the heart of the Jeremy Fragrance brand—one that perplexes his fans as much as it compels them to keep watching—is where Jeremy Fragrance the character ends and where Jeremy Fragrance the person begins.
“I decided to always be Jeremy Fragrance,” he says. “I’m [playing] myself as my own computer game character.”
Fragrance was born Daniel Sredzinski and later changed his name to Daniel Schütz. He joined a German boy band called Part Six in the late 2000s and adopted the stage name Jeremy Williams. After leaving Part Six, he eventually landed on YouTube, where he started posting about perfume and changed his name again, to Jeremy Fragrance.
Around 2021, he caught the attention of users on Reddit’s r/fragrance subreddit. They tried (and failed) to figure out what his deal was. He moved to Miami. He started making videos, ostensibly perfume reviews, that would slowly devolve into weird monologues about how he wants a girlfriend or masturbates without climaxing after working out to raise his sexual energy (many of those videos have since been deleted). More recently, he has launched a Kickstarter to design his own perfume and was formally invited to Pakistan by the country’s prime minister.
It’s not uncommon to see a commenter ask “how many lines today?” under a video of his. But Fragrance is adamant he doesn’t do any drugs—he repeats this several times on stage and during our conversation as well. On stage he also (sort of) addressed the weirdly sexual nature of a lot of his older videos, explaining that he’s “very horny, [but] ethically.”
The bizarre silliness of Fragrance’s videos belies the fact that he is very consciously optimizing his content. He tells GQ that even though he started primarily on YouTube, he noticed that the views he was getting on one 10-minute video weren’t as high as what he would get on three one-minute videos elsewhere. So he pivoted to short-form content. “That’s where the attention is,” he says.
Rules of the internet like this are beginning to change, and creators are bracing for what the advent of AI might mean for people who make their living on social platforms. But if we really are heading into a future where influencers, creators, and AI avatars will blend into a slurry of entertainment and salesmanship on our feeds, in many ways, Fragrance is well positioned to pass through that uncanny valley. And, in the same way that he was pragmatic in his decision to abandon YouTube for TikTok, Fragrance does not seem overly worried about it.
“AI already does fragrances,” he says matter-of-factly. “Artificial influencers are popular. And so that’s why I think even that gets outsourced. Like, computer game characters are already role models for some people.”
But if you look closely, you can glimpse the line between the character and the real person, and he does seem to care deeply about perfume. Like when Fragrance describes his personal fragrance as “mint.” When GQ tells him it smells “woody,” he seems annoyed, and lets the mask drop ever so slightly.
“Woody. Yeah?” he asks in a flat deadpan. “Interesting.”