Rice Perfumes Are the Unexpected Trend Replacing Gourmands This Summer
The simple ingredient lends itself to some complex fragrances.
Key Takeaways
- Rice perfumes are having a moment, and the warm, comforting note works across a wide range of formulations.
- Fragrance experts Jun Lim and Bee Shapiro explain the trend.
Rice is usually associated with a plain, even bland diet — but as Sophie Vilensky points out, the grain itself is anything but boring. It has a remarkably long history: the earliest cultivation is traced back some 13,000 years to China’s Yangtze River region. Cultivation can also be followed along India’s Ganges as early as 6500 BC, while African rice — a separate species, Oryza glaberrima — was domesticated within roughly the last 3,000 years.
Vilensky jokes that this history could fill a very pleasant afternoon of research, ideally with a Zojirushi rice cooker set and the subject studied properly. Or, she suggests, you could experience the grain in a more sensual way instead — by joining the rice-perfume trend.
Bee Shapiro, founder of Ellis Brooklyn, sees rice as a fresh take on the gourmand category, and as something that feels like home: she ate rice every day growing up. And although the note feels newer, she adds, it is also deeply familiar — most people know rice, and they know its smell.
Why Rice Perfume Is Trending
Rice may be popular this summer, but it is not a new note in perfumery. Borntostandout perfumer Jun Lim first conceived his rice fragrance, Dirty Rice, back in 2020.
If there is a rice moment now, Lim says, it reflects a broader desire for fragrances that feel more human. He contrasts that with gourmands that are intensely sweet, edible, and almost exaggeratedly indulgent — and suggests people may now want something quieter, more tactile, and emotionally familiar instead. Shapiro adds that rice has a cozy, textured quality that pairs beautifully with the creamy, lactonic notes that have been popular lately. And because the rice note itself is not very sweet, she notes, it can be taken in many different directions.
What Rice Perfume Smells Like
For Lim, rice is closer to a lived experience than to a dessert — more like a life, as he puts it. The note is extremely soft and comforting, with a warm, gentle milkiness that is never strongly sweet, and its intensity can be dialed up or down by the perfumer.
It can call to mind warm skin, steam rising in a kitchen, clean cloth, or simply being at home — without necessarily smelling conventionally “clean.” What it offers, Lim says, is closeness rather than immediate pleasure. After years of loud gourmand scents, people may be ready for something that stays nearer the body and speaks more quietly.
The Best Rice Perfumes
As the trend grows, Lim hopes perfumers will keep varying the note — treating rice as a creative material rather than only a familiar smell. He points to its many possible transformations: fermenting it, toasting it, burning it, powdering it, soaking it, spoiling it, distilling it, even turning it into alcohol. And it can carry just as many meanings — comfort, poverty, ceremony, home life, sensuality, decay. There is a whole emotional and cultural world around it, he says, and the future question should not be whether a scent smells exactly like rice, but what rice can become.
The scents below, Vilensky notes, do exactly that — while still keeping some of the realistic, steaming-bowl-of-rice quality that many shoppers will want.
Ellis Brooklyn Vanilla Rice Eau de Parfum
The brand describes Vanilla Rice as shy, charming, and sweet in a milky way. It takes a sweeter approach to rice, built on toasted rice alongside sugary-floral Sakura blossom, vanilla, coconut milk, mandarin, freesia dew, and jasmine nectar.
For founder Bee Shapiro, the fragrance is personal. She grew up in Seattle as a first-generation immigrant, and as a young person she often felt she struggled to be heard and seen. Looking back now, she can see that part of that longing was internal — tied to becoming comfortable with herself and recognizing her own worth, which had been there all along. With its rice and cherry-blossom notes, she says, Vanilla Rice honors her Asian American roots. It also expresses what she calls “soft power”: a scent that does not need to be loud to be noticed.
Borntostandout Dirty Rice
First, a clarification Vilensky is quick to make: this is not the Louisiana dish. Here, “dirty” means rice made a little sexy. The fragrance itself is warm and sheer, developed by Lim with Olivier Cresp in 2020. It opens with bergamot and almond before Basmati rice arrives with peony and milk, over a base of santalwood, vetiver, and animalic musk.
Lim, the brand’s founder, says he started with rice precisely because it seemed like one of the most conservative, familiar, and unmistakably Korean materials he could choose. Rice is humble and domestic — almost too ordinary to seem provocative — and he wanted to corrupt it. He paired that familiar material with a strong sensuality: warm skin, musk, milkiness, something almost bodily. The aim was to take a symbol of purity and comfort and make it feel intimate, rebellious, and slightly improper. That contrast became an early template for the brand: take something culturally familiar, emotionally safe, or apparently innocent — and reveal the desire beneath it.
Maddie’s Secret Eau de Parfum
This one was inspired by John Early’s movie Maddie’s Secret, which Vilensky calls brilliant — and which is now streaming. Its notes are night-blooming jasmine, chocolate milk, toasted rice, saffron, and Sichuan pepper.
Normally, Vilensky says, she would be asking for more movie-inspired fragrances after seeing one succeed like this — but she doubts anyone could do it better than Marissa Zappas and Early. She closes the entry by addressing Maddie directly, asking playfully whether Maddie ever gets tired of smelling this good.
D.Grayi Ceremonial Rice
The newest entry on this list comes from D.Grayi, a fragrance brand making scent art rooted in Vietnamese and Korean origins, reimagined through a queer, contemporary viewpoint. Ceremonial Rice celebrates rice in several of its forms.
It opens with rice wine, betel leaf, betel nut, and jasmine rice. The heart brings lotus tea, orchid, tuberose, and sticky rice, and the base settles into agarwood incense, silken musk, and tapioca mungbean cake.
Floraïku Paris One Umbrella For Two
Vilensky jokes that she will happily share an umbrella — she just wants her own portion of rice. This is a fruity, sweet gourmand fragrance. Rice appears as a top note in puffed form, together with blackcurrant absolute.
Its heart contains cyclamen accord and Genmaicha tea extract — which Vilensky calls both tasty and very fashionable at the moment — over a base of musks, woody notes, vanilla accord, and cedarwood essence.
Ormonde Jayne Champaca Parfum
A longstanding leading example in the rice-perfume field, this soft, floral Champaca has carried a Basmati rice note since 2002. The fragrance takes its name from a type of magnolia flower widely grown in India — and that flower sits at its heart, together with the rice note.
d’Annam White Rice
The name, Vilensky notes, honors Vietnam’s cultural symbol of livelihood. The brand’s perfumers explain on their website that rice’s scent is beautiful but very delicate — so to bring out its sweetness and distinctive character, they added milky and floral notes, including pandan, jasmine, and white musk.
And where cotton candy is all shapeless softness, they point out, a grain of rice has structure. They emphasized that quality with a touch of nuttiness from orris, along with woody tones.
Diptyque L’Eau Papier
Rice and paper, Vilensky observes, are both excellent starting points for creativity. Diptyque’s musky L’Eau Papier was created to celebrate imagination — and the moment ink meets paper. It uses rice in an inventive way, through a rice-steam accord that recalls the texture of a fresh sheet of paper.
Oddity Naked Dance
Naked Dance was created to honor domestic life — a world where people are free to dance unclothed and cook as much rice as they wish. Its top notes are presented as warm, intimate, and comforting, like sun-warmed skin, with orange blossom, bergamot, and green tea.
Rice enters in the middle, alongside clay, lily, iris, and a drop of Turkish rose. The base is white musk, incense, sandalwood, vetiver, tonka, and guaiac wood — and the finished scent is musky, milky, powdery, slightly soapy, and bitter.
