20 Perfumes on One Shelf? That’s Not a Collection. That’s Greed with Atomizers.

Walk into any luxury apartment in New York, L.A., or Miami these days and you'll find the same thing: a perfectly curated shelf lined with bottles from Le Labo, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Byredo, Diptyque, and whatever else TikTok has decided smells rich this week.

The caps are polished, the labels face forward, and the lighting is just right. It’s not a bathroom anymore. It’s a shrine. But here’s the thing nobody wants to say: you don’t need 20 perfumes. You’re not building a fragrance library. You’re hoarding.

Let’s call it what it is. If this were food, we’d call it gluttony. If it were clothes, we’d call it fast fashion. But because it’s perfume and packaged in artfully weighted glass, suddenly it’s called a "collection."

In cities like Dallas and Atlanta, where identity is tightly woven into presentation, fragrance has become another status symbol. It’s not about wearing a scent. It’s about owning them all. It’s about posting your shelf on IG stories with captions like “today’s mood,” as if your identity shifts daily from crisp bergamot to syrupy oud.

But scent isn’t mood. Scent is memory. Scent is storytelling. Scent is restraint. The best fragrances are the ones people associate with you, not the ones you swap out depending on whether you’re brunching in SoHo or grabbing matcha on Melrose.

In Washington D.C., it’s now common to hear someone say, “this is my meeting scent,” as if they need a separate bottle just to sign contracts. The capitalist over-functioning of fragrance has turned something that once connected us to place, emotion, and personal history into another tool for performative productivity.

Here’s a radical idea for Americans in the age of overconsumption: maybe your signature scent shouldn’t be five sprays of whatever your favorite influencer was paid to promote this week. Maybe it should be one scent you wear into the ground. One fragrance that becomes part of how you're remembered. Not a carousel of trends.

That’s where brands like Maison D’Abba quietly shift the conversation. Built on the idea that perfume is a sacred extension of the self, not a product to rotate by season—their compositions aren’t designed for trend cycles. They’re crafted to live with you. Settle into your skin. Age with grace.

In Houston, in Chicago, even in smaller cities like Charleston or Santa Fe, the best-dressed person in the room isn’t always the one who smells the loudest or the newest. It’s the one whose presence lingers without announcing itself. And that usually doesn’t come from a “collection.” That comes from consistency. From taste. From letting the scent become a second skin, not a rotating costume. So before you add another bottle to your shelf, ask yourself: are you buying art, or just buying comfort?

 Are you curating a scent identity, or just keeping up with people who forgot that restraint is the real luxury? Because at the end of the day, you don’t need 20 perfumes. You need one that speaks for you without saying a word.