Answer in brief
None of the sources used for this piece describe a study conducted on celebrity perfumes specifically. Peer-reviewed research does confirm that a verbal label can change how an ordinary, non-fragrance scent is rated for pleasantness; carrying that finding over to celebrity perfumes stays a hypothesis, one that can only be tested with a closed list of answer options, an unbranded control sample, and an administrator who does not know which code matches which scent.
Celebrity perfume blind test: three questions hiding inside one
Can someone recognize a celebrity's perfume from smell alone, with no bottle, no box, and no name on the label? It is tempting to reduce a celebrity perfume question to one general 'like it or not,' but three separate questions actually hide behind it: does the person recognize the brand or face from the scent, does the pleasantness rating of the very same sample shift once the person learns the name on the bottle, and can they guess the retail price blind. An answer to one of those questions does not predict the answers to the other two.
This piece is not a report on an experiment that happened; it lays out what science and the market have already confirmed, and how a genuinely fair test would need to be built if one were run. There are no exact figures, percentages, or winners here, and there cannot be until such a test is physically carried out with real samples and real participants — until then, explaining the mechanism and the method honestly beats staging a result that does not exist.
How a verbal label reshapes a scent rating: the Herz experiments
The idea that a name on a label can change the impression of the scent itself rests on peer-reviewed experiments in olfactory psychology — though, as becomes clear below, not on perfumes or celebrity imagery. In a study by Rachel Herz and Julia von Clef, published in the journal Perception in 2001, the same people smelled five odors twice, a week apart — among them violet leaf, patchouli, pine oil, menthol, and a mix of isovaleric and butyric acid — and in each of the two sessions the very same odor carried a different verbal label, once positive and once negative.
The label significantly changed how pleasant the same physical odor was rated, and in some cases reversed the rating outright: the authors describe such cases as 'verbal labels inverted odor perception.' In a later study by Herz, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2003, verbal information about a scent's source changed the hedonic rating of eight common odors presented in natural and synthetic form, regardless of whether the scent was physically present to be smelled at that moment.
One important caveat: both experiments used ordinary, non-perfume, non-celebrity odors — none of the sources used here describe a study of celebrity perfume recognition specifically. Carrying that finding over to celebrity perfumes is logically plausible, since the underlying mechanism is the same — a word reshapes how a sensation is perceived — but that is an extrapolation, not a replication of someone else's experiment on the actual material in question, and it needs to be tested again rather than assumed proven.
License or hands-on work: how celebrity perfumes actually get made
A celebrity's name on a bottle does not always mean she had a hand in building the formula. Wikipedia's account of Lovely's history offers a telling exception: Sarah Jessica Parker, who released Lovely in 2005, was personally interested in perfumery and took part in developing it, even though the formula itself was composed by perfumers Clement Gavarry and Laurent Le Guernec of International Flavors & Fragrances.
The same article frames this as an exception to a more common practice, in which a celebrity lends her name and face to promote a fragrance under license and, in Wikipedia's phrasing, takes part in little else besides publicity for the scent itself. This material has no precise industry figures on what share of celebrity perfumes are made this way, so it is more accurate to say the model varies than to claim everyone works the same way. For a recognition test, this separates two things people often conflate: the name on the bottle and the contents of the bottle are not always the work of the same person.
Who is selling celebrity perfume in 2026
This is not a historical curiosity; it is an active market. One recent example is Megan Thee Stallion's 'Hot Girl Summer Eau de Parfum.' Per Coty's press release from July 2, 2026, it is a limited unisex fragrance in 90ml and 10ml sizes, sold through select retailers in the US, UK, and Canada and on the artist's own site; in the US, per The Source, sales ran through Ulta Beauty. Per Ulta Beauty's brand page as of September 15, 2026, the US price was $29 for 10ml and $84 for 90ml. The Source quotes her on July 2, 2026: 'Perfume is the last thing you put on, but it's the first thing people remember.'
Later, on July 31, 2026, Hypebeast reported that another celebrity fragrance was already on sale online: Billie Eilish's 'Eilish Intense.' The same artist's earlier scent, 'Your Turn,' launched in February 2025, per the outlet El Plural.
Among earlier releases: Ariana Grande's 'Cloud Pink' fragrance went on sale on Ulta.com in August 2023, per WWD. Sabrina Carpenter's 'Caramel Dream' debuted in the US in summer 2023, per Grazia UK, and launched in the UK in 2024 at £24.99 for 30ml; but Ulta Beauty's brand page, as of September 15, 2026, lists different prices — from $35 to $55 — so that 2024 UK price cannot be used as a current comparison point for the US market.
Two more lines are confirmed as of September 15, 2026 by the sellers' own pages, but without a reliably established launch date in the sources available here: Beyoncé's 'Cé Lumière' sells on Ulta Beauty for $160, and 'Suite 302' sells on the Victoria Beckham Beauty site for $200 or $290 depending on size.
What those older Beyoncé and Aguilera sales figures actually mean
Figures from past years often get cited to show the category's scale, but they are easy to distort if the source's exact wording is not preserved. Per WWD from August 9, 2013, a Coty Prestige representative said Beyoncé's fragrances combined had generated more than $400 million in retail sales, putting her fragrance house among the top three best-selling celebrity perfume lines alongside the Elizabeth Taylor and Justin Bieber lines. That figure covers Beyoncé's entire fragrance house, not the single Heat line, and that top-three ranking is among celebrity fragrances, not among all perfumes worldwide.
Per WWD from May 12, 2016, Stifel analyst Mark Astrachan, in a January note that year, estimated sales of the Christina Aguilera Fragrances license at roughly $80 million, with EBITDA around $10 million; that is an estimate of sales over a period, not a steady monthly income figure. Both numbers are a historical scale marker as of 2013 and 2016, not current 2026 performance for either line, which this piece has no data on.
How a genuinely fair blind test would need to be built
For a recognition round to show anything at all, it cannot be built as an open question with no options: if a participant is handed a numbered sample and simply asked what it is, almost any answer will turn out wrong, purely because the number of possible answers is unlimited. A fair protocol calls for a closed list of brands, categories, and public figures with decoy options, fixed in advance together with the list of samples themselves.
Revealing the name after a blind rating of one sample must not happen in the same round as rating the remaining samples: a participant who has just learned they are smelling a celebrity perfume will guess differently from then on, skewing every later answer. So it makes more sense to run the full blind circuit across all samples — recognition, pleasantness, price — entirely before any reveal, and to move the before-and-after comparison of ratings to a separate, later stage.
The administrator handing samples to the participant must not know which code corresponds to which scent, or they risk unintentionally hinting at the answer through tone or a pause. A control sample without a celebrity name, matched for price and fragrance profile, is also useful: without it, a test can only answer whether people recognize the scent, not whether it is worth the money — the question the category is usually being discussed for in the first place.
Technical details decide the outcome too: samples should go on blotter strips rather than skin, at an equal dose and with equal dwell time before rating, because a fragrance's top notes evaporate faster than its base notes. For the pause between samples, plain airing and ordinary air work better than sniffing coffee beans: per a 2011 study by Grosofsky and colleagues in Perceptual and Motor Skills, coffee beans showed no advantage over plain air or lemon slices as a way to reset the nose between odors.
What such a test could actually show, and what would stay unknown
Even with a careful protocol, the result from a small volunteer group is a preliminary observation, not a statistically significant study: a conclusion drawn from a few dozen participants or fewer cannot be generalized to the whole celebrity perfume category, and that limitation needs to be stated outright in any published result, not implied.
There is a separate question of trust if a publication were to run such a test itself: VITON13 has its own fragrance line, VITON XIII, and including it in a test as an unbranded budget control without a clear disclosure to the reader would be a conflict of interest. If such a test is ever run, the involvement of any sample connected to the publication itself needs to be disclosed separately, not disguised as a neutral control.
Finally, the psychological basis the test idea rests on has been proven on everyday, non-perfume odors — the direction and strength of that effect specifically on celebrity perfumes has not been confirmed on its own yet. Assuming in advance that the name on the bottle always outweighs the formula would mean claiming a result that does not yet exist.
How a reader can test a similar effect on their own
Testing the mechanism itself — not conclusions about specific brands, but the fact that a verbal label can change how a scent is rated — needs no lab. For example, ask someone close to you to smell, on different days, two identical but differently labeled samples of the same everyday, non-perfume scent, and compare the pleasantness ratings: if the ratings diverge more than random variation would explain, that is a household, not strictly scientific, illustration of the same effect Herz and von Clef demonstrated.
As for celebrity perfumes specifically, a reader who wants to know whether they are paying for a name can at least compare the composition, volume, and price per milliliter of the fragrance they are interested in against non-celebrity scents in the same price bracket and fragrance family. That is not a substitute for a full blind test, but it offers a separate, simpler check — on price and composition alone, without the recognition and pleasantness rounds a blind test is actually built from.
Practical checklist
- A closed list of brands and categories for the recognition round, with decoy options, not an open-ended answer
- The same dose, the same strip, and the same dwell time for every sample, with nothing applied to skin
- The administrator handing out samples does not know which code corresponds to which scent
- At least one control fragrance without a celebrity name in the same price category
- Airing and a pause between samples instead of sniffing coffee beans
- Written participant consent and screening for allergies or smell disorders before the session starts
Questions and answers
Why does a fair test need to hide the bottle itself, not just the name?
Many well-known lines have a bottle shape that is recognizable on its own, so hiding the name alone is not enough: it is methodologically safer to decant samples into neutral containers or apply them to strips with no visible packaging nearby.
Do the Herz experiments prove that the name on a perfume bottle changes how the scent feels?
Not directly: both experiments tested verbal labels on ordinary household odors, not celebrity names on perfume bottles, so carrying the finding over to fragrance stays a hypothesis that still needs to be tested on its own.
Is it fair to compare celebrity perfumes against niche or budget fragrances in the same test?
It can be done, but without a control sample in the same price category and without a celebrity name, the result will not show whether a person is paying for the formula or just for the name on the label.
How many participants would a test like this need before it could be trusted?
A small group of volunteers only gives a preliminary observation, not a statistically significant result; the sample size and its limits need to be stated plainly rather than presenting a trial run as a representative study.
Is there a bias risk if the publication running the test also sells its own fragrance?
Yes, which is why VITON13's own fragrance samples cannot be entered into such a test as a budget control without a clear disclosure to the reader — otherwise the result could not be trusted because of the conflict of interest.