Is there something wrong with Jeremy Fragrance?

Attempting to get inside the mind of social media attraction Jeremy Fragrance, the number 1 fragrance icon who follows the teachings of Jesus.

A quote from the Daily Nation is prominently displayed on influencer Jeremy Fragrance’s personal website. It describes him as, “the most-referenced example of a fragrance influencer”.

The superlative is funny because it highlights the difficulty of describing what it is that has turned Jeremy Fragrance, real name Daniel Schultz, into a social media sensation. You can’t describe him as the most informative fragrance influencer, because these days he barely tells you anything about perfumes. He can’t be described as the most popular because, although he has over 15 million followers across his social media pages, who would describe themselves as a Jeremy Fragrance fan? The majority of those followers are perturbed bystanders.

‘Most-referenced’ seems about right. If there’s one thing Mr Fragrance is good at doing, it’s getting people talking. After all, he hasn’t accumulated all those followers for nothing.

For the uninitiated, the purported intention of the Jeremy Fragrance account is to review different perfumes, body sprays, colognes etc, offering quality analysis of a fragrance’s scent portfolio while providing advice on what sort of event/person it’s appropriate for.

Could this sweet, God-loving man really be trolling you for views?

However, this veneer of expertise has long since faded in Jeremy’s transition to the TikTok era. Six years ago, Jeremy was putting out top 10 lists and reviews on his YouTube channel, for example ‘10 best fragrances for men’, or ‘Top 5 sexiest women’s perfumes’. Not exactly highbrow stuff, but it was filmed with a tripod and contained Jeremy’s detailed opinions on every fragrance he was discussing.

Now, the German-Polish influencer haunts the Instagram and TikTok algorithms, uploading a copious quantity of absurd 30 second snippets recorded from his phone. Treating his viewers with around 3 to 5 new videos daily, I would describe Jeremy’s method as ‘throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks’.

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A post shared by @jeremyfragrance

A Jeremy Fragrance video typically falls into one of the below categories:

1. Actual fragrance reviews. This usually consists of him spraying a bottle in the air, repeating its name, and summarising its scent profile, usually with the descriptor ‘sexy’,

2. Guessing the fragrances of fans who approach him in the street.

3. Videos of him dancing and/or thrusting and/or spraying fragrance to loud pop music, often featuring a disembodied female leg/foot.

4. Reposts of memes or edits that feature himself.

But increasingly the most common (and popular) Jeremy Fragrance videos are:

5. Absurdist content involving fragrances in an extremely tangential way, or not at all. E.g. Jeremy stripping cardboard boxes of tape with his teeth; Jeremy storing fragrance bottle caps in his mouth and spitting them into his hand; Jeremy sticking his tongue in and out of a water fountain stream; 30 seconds of uncut close-up footage of Jeremy staring directly into the camera...

The increasingly surreal nature of Jeremy Fragrance’s content has led viewers on social media to speculate that he’s on drugs. Every video is accompanied by comments from amused or concerned members of his audience who are convinced the only reason he acts so bizarrely is because he’s coked up.

jeremyfragrance

A post shared by @jeremyfragrance

Is he? It’s a fair question. The poor man does look a little haggard these days, but maybe that’s simply the weight of being the number 1 fragrance icon who follows the teachings of Jesus (that’s his self-ascribed tagline, by the way). Heavy is the head that wears the crown of being the most-referenced example of a fragrance influencer.

As to whether Jeremy is perpetually skiing the proverbial slopes: if he is as devotedly Christian as he claims, I would be surprised if he were a cocaine addict. Besides, I am convinced his entire account is performance art. All these weird videos of him staring and thrusting and spraying are actually an extremely shrewd promotional gambit, because Mr Fragrance has been in the business long enough to know that this behaviour will get him views, and therefore money. There was a time when top 10 lists were enough to get eyeballs on screen, but not in this concentration-deficient age where content creators have a second to grab your attention. And Jeremy Fragrance knows that the best way to secure that is by immediately doing something visually provocative.

What is happening here, Jeremy?

I was pleased to have this suspicion confirmed in my research: in a 2023 interview, he claimed he has never done drugs and only acts bizarrely to earn money (or so Wikipedia tells me, the interview is entirely in German so I’ll have to trust that’s what he says).

This assertion still doesn’t explain away some of Jeremy Fragrance’s more interesting (let’s call them that) moments. For example, last summer he set up an email address, girlfriend@jeremyfragrance.com, to find himself a partner, with submissions welcomed from Christian women under the age of 32. Fairly creepy stuff. Additionally, around the US election in 2024 he claimed he would vote for Donald Trump if he could, and took a smiling picture at an event where the orange man was speaking. Is this more ragebait, or the real opinions of a right-wing Christian who foolishly expects young women to throw themselves into his Gmail inbox because he’s famous online? It’s hard to tell.

To return to my original question: is there something wrong with Jeremy Fragrance? Even if most of his videos are ironic, you could still argue that he’s a vain, attention-seeking conservative who lacks self-awareness and is unable to move on from a job he probably should have given up years ago. So if there’s something wrong with Jeremy Fragrance, then many others among us are similarly diseased.