Petrichor Fragrances Were Made for the Dog Days of Summer

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There is a town in India dedicated to capturing the scent of rain. For centuries, perfume-makers in Kannauj, an ancient village about 250 miles northwest of Delhi, have been distilling kiln-baked clay and sandalwood oil to create a precious elixir called mitti attar that smells like precipitation falling on dry soil. We all know this scent, the humid, vaguely metallic tang of moisture meeting earth at the beginning of a rainstorm that is as fleeting as it is highly specific. It’s called petrichor—a word derived from the Greek petra (stone) and ichor (the blood of the gods)—and I find it utterly magical. I have a tiny bottle of mitti attar from India that was given to me by a friend, and every time I sniff it, I feel as though I am simultaneously uncorking a memory and opening up a new world.

Evidently, I am not alone. As this long, hot summer has unspooled, online searches for petrichor fragrances have surged (94.4% since last year, according to market research platform Spate Data). People seem to be craving the scent of something cooling and quenching, an olfactive promise that less oppressive weather lies ahead. It may also be happening for the same reason that tomato-leaf fragrances are trending: Many of us are experiencing an urge to reconnect with the natural world, especially in ways that remind us of childhood.

“Everyone has memories of petrichor,” says Steven Gontarski, senior brand manager for niche fragrance retailer Luckyscent. “Summer vacation when you were a kid, or going on a road trip and getting caught in the rain. It’s nostalgic, and many of us are feeling a desire to go back to a more comforting time.” Along with an upswing in customer requests for fragrances featuring a petrichor note, Gontarski is also seeing an increased interest in perfumes that suggest the smell of mushrooms, oysters, and pollen. “It may be attributed to the ‘touch grass’ notion,” he says. “We get so wrapped up in the digital world that we lose sight of the fact that we’re actually mammals living on Earth. When I reach that point, I definitely have the desire to look at stars and smell the ground.”

The scent of petrichor is produced when microbes living in soil and rocks are released by the impact of raindrops, combined with the smell of organic compounds emitted by plants that are amplified by the presence of moisture. This reaction tends to happen when the earth is particularly parched, which is why you don’t smell petrichor every single time it rains, giving it an elusive quality that adds to its allure. Although the phenomenon was first identified in the late 1800s, it wasn’t until 1964 that Australian researchers Joy Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas coined the word “petrichor” to describe it. The following year, scientists isolated geosmin, the specific molecule responsible for petrichor’s wet-earth smell, which is also found in raw beets, freshly dug soil, and clammy basements. The human nose is remarkably adept at smelling it; we can detect it in levels as low as a few parts per trillion.

The smell of petrichor is relatively new in perfumery, although there have been many beautiful olfactive meditations on the idea of rain over the years, including Guerlain’s iconic Après l’Ondée (which translates as “after the rain”), a powdery floral from 1906. The first synthetic geosmin note became commercially available in the early 2000s, and perfumers began to play with it to evoke a realistic sense of thunderstorms and rain-struck earth. However, geosmin is notoriously hard to work with as it can easily skew musty when used with too heavy a hand. Perfumers often opt to build a petrichor effect with other ingredients, using the grassy aroma of vetiver, the loamy smell of patchouli, or marine notes and aldehydes to elicit an impression of electricity-charged air and thirsty vegetation.

Douglas Little, the perfumer and founder of Heretic, frequently employs petrichor-evoking notes to create atmosphere and add a patina of deep-time mystery to his scents. “Petrichor is the smell of the earth exhaling,” he says. “It’s not really rain. It’s what rain awakens. Dry soil, cracked roots, stone, moss, mineral dust, and microscopic life. There is something almost prehistoric about it.” Petrichor runs as a common thread through Heretic’s new Ghost Stories collection, a group of five scents that Little describes as “olfactory apparitions” conjuring liminal spaces like abandoned gardens, misty forests, and dusty corridors in haunted houses. In Spectral Grace, ozonic notes cast a shimmer of cold air over a wash of pale rose; in Shadow People, the mineral scent of geosmin collides with oakmoss and musk in a way that makes the scent feel almost three-dimensional. “Petrichor immediately changes the emotional temperature of a fragrance,” Little says. “Instead of feeling decorative, it makes a perfume feel inhabited.”

D.S. & Durga cofounder and perfumer David Seth Moltz, who considers petrichor a brand signature (he used it to ground Concrete After Lightning and Big Sur After Rain, and to create the aerosolized, summer-shower effect of Steamed Rainbow), echoes this sentiment: “Petrichor adds realness to a composition,” he says. “It makes your perfume seem like you are actually in a space like a forest or by the water, not in a fantasy world just based on those places.”

This nuanced, environmental effect is what gives so many petrichor-forward perfumes their beauty—and their impact. “Almost everyone has a visceral reaction to the smell of rain,” says Fulton & Roark founder and perfumer Kevin Keller, who tapped into mitti attar to summon a sense of impending rain in Cloudland, a scent inspired by a hike interrupted by a rainstorm. For Korean brand Nonfiction’s Tears In Rain, perfumer Yann Vasnier combined herbaceous geranium with moss and vetiver to elicit the impression of a forest just after a downpour. Le Labo’s Baie 19, a scent frequently name-checked by petrichor lovers on Reddit, captures the smell of humid air and wet leaves with notes of juniper, ozone, patchouli, and musk. Marissa Zappas’s ethereal Petrichor employs soft, powdery iris to suggest the scent of earth and flowers drenched in fresh H2O, and the moody Dreams & Nightmares from L’Epoque, in which petrichor is couched in eucalyptus and soft amber, smells like a cabin in the woods on a stormy night.

Should you wish to smell like an actual cloudburst, you can do no better than Demeter Fragrance Library, which is known for its catalog of photorealistic scents. CEO and chief perfumer Mark Crames says he was inspired by “the multitude of ways that [English romantic painter] J.M.W. Turner could paint light” to concoct several scents exploring interactions between air, water, and earth. His creations are unbelievably evocative: Petrichor smells weightless and evanescent, as though you’ve just opened a window and caught a fading whiff of geosmin, and Thunderstorm practically crackles with the bolts of lightning that precede a deluge.

The fact that some of us are seeking this sensation in perfume, of all things, may seem strange—especially as it’s so dramatically different from the vanillic and foodie fragrances we have grown accustomed to. But this could be precisely the appeal: The scent of petrichor, more than anything else, signals change. We recognize it on a primal level as the smell of a rejuvenated world. Wanting to immerse ourselves in it, to wear it on our skin, might be more than just a yearning to ditch our devices and heed the call of the wild. Petrichor is the very essence of new beginnings, a scent that carries within it the elemental promise of a fresh start. “There is melancholy in it, but also hope,” says Little. “It suggests transformation, the charged moment before growth begins. It is the smell of life returning.”

Could anything be more perfect for fall?

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Heretic

Spectral Grace Eau De Parfum

$125

Nordstrom

$125

Credo Beauty