What Do You Do When You're Allergic to Everyone?

04.03.2026, 18:30 allure.com

That night in March of 2021 was a typical one for Cami Oresky, then a senior at the University of Miami. She was engaging in one of girlhood's most beloved rituals—that is, she was getting ready to go out with her friends. As usual, she applied her skin care and makeup, styled her hair, and put on a cute going-out top. Also as usual, she spritzed on her perfume. But this time, something unusual happened. Her eyes began to burn and swell.

Oresky, now 26, says the year that followed was an incredibly disorienting period of her life. "I just kept getting more and more sick,” she says. “I obviously didn't know what I was allergic to, so I continued to wear perfume every day, and my shampoo and conditioner were fragranced, and I had a plug-in in my apartment…." Getting her official diagnosis—more on that in a moment—took trial and error and endless appointments with doctors who didn't understand what was happening to her or, in some cases, didn't believe that anything really was. "I went to a doctor because my eyes were so swollen, and his response to me was that I was just aging, and that's why I had such bad bags under my eyes," says Oresky. At the time, she was 21 years old.

Today, fragrance is just as popular as it’s ever been, if not more so. According to Google Trends, searches for "perfume" have steadily increased (with predictable spikes every December thanks to holiday shopping) since about May of 2020. The popularity of the term reached an all-time high in December of 2025, with searches more than double that of December 2020. As of this writing, there are 1.7 million posts labeled #PerfumeTok on TikTok. And according to a report from Grand View Research, a market research and consulting firm, the overall perfume market was valued at 59.85 billion in 2025; that number is projected to grow to 78.85 billion by 2030.

Allison Collins, co-founder and managing director of advisory firm The Consumer Collective, confirmed that the perfume boom is full steam ahead and pinpointed the very start of it as far back as 2016. “It was slow to bloom, if you will,” she says. “The American market is not historically the most advanced or sophisticated fragrance market globally, but in 2016 we started to see more interest.” Collins says that’s when indie perfumes started to come onto the scene and larger cosmetics brands began to acquire niche fragrance houses. But things really got going in the early years of COVID, when lockdown and social distancing measures were in place. “That’s when we started to see how consumers engage with fragrance shift a little bit,” says Collins. “Fragrance is the most emotional of all the [beauty] categories; it has these limitless world-building capabilities, mentally, for someone. Coming out of the pandemic it was as if people were like, ‘I want to live.’”

Perfume has always been popular, but there are two things that Collins says distinguish this era’s perfume boom from any other. The first is connoisseurship; because of social media, the average perfume user is way more informed about fragrance. Filed under #PerfumeTok are hyper-detailed videos about the origins of orris and a ranking of the greatest musk scents of all time. “The most meaningful shift that I saw last year was actually people who definitely don’t know that much about fragrance doing their ‘get ready with me’ and talking about fragrance as part of their routine,” says Collins. The other distinguishing factor is cross-category growth. In other words, brands are putting fragrance in products they never used to put it in because consumers are seeking fragrance in all parts of their lives. “They’re finding new ways to incorporate fragrances throughout their day,” says Collins. See: solid perfumes, hair mists, and luxury laundry detergents.

But not everyone is eager to live in a perpetually-fragranced world. A 2019 study out of the University of Melbourne found that across four countries (the U.S., Australia, the U.K., and Sweden), 32.2 percent of adults self-reported some form of fragrance sensitivity. Which means that for some people, the omnipresence of perfumes has presented enhanced challenges in an already difficult situation. I spoke to people with fragrance allergies diagnosed through patch-testing, as well as folks with fragrance sensitivities and reactivities resulting primarily from two complex, still-emergent conditions: MCAS (mast cell activation syndrome) and MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity). Their experiences vary from mildly inconvenient to seriously life-threatening, and they all mitigate their symptoms in different ways—but they all agree that the perfume boom has meant it's harder than ever to avoid fragrance.

"If we talk about having a fragrance allergy, for the vast majority of cases, we're talking about allergic contact dermatitis," says Songhui Ma, MD, a board-certified allergist and immunologist and assistant clinical professor at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Think of a poison ivy rash, the most commonly known example of contact dermatitis: the skin is red, itchy, swollen, and flaking. Severe cases might even include blistering. Contact dermatitis can be caused by a multitude of substances; according to a study conducted at the University of Wisconsin in 2020, fragrance allergies account for between five and 11 percent of contact dermatitis cases, while between .7 and 2.6 percent of the general population has been formally diagnosed with a fragrance allergy.

For cases of potential allergic contact dermatitis, there's a fairly straightforward and widely accepted diagnostic protocol called patch testing, usually performed by an allergist, immunologist, or dermatologist. "We affix big strips of tape with different chemicals on them to a patient’s the back," says Dr. Ma. "We test for the most common allergens." When it comes to fragrance, a typical patch test includes fragrance mix 1, a blend of eight fragrance chemicals; fragrance mix 2, a blend of six; and Balsam of Peru, a particularly prevalent fragrance allergen. "I like to think of it as the way we interrogate the skin's immune system," says Emily Milam, MD, a board-certified dermatologist at NYU Langone who specializes in skin allergies. In addition to fragrance, the sticky strips include things like preservatives, textile dyes, metals, and more. They're left on for 48 hours, then removed. "We draw a grid on the back with a marker to keep track of where we placed everything, and then we all go home, and then we return at the end of the week, and we look to see which squares have developed a rash that signifies that those ingredients could be a problem," explains Dr. Milam.

After patch-testing with her allergist, Oresky now knows that she's allergic to Balsam of Peru, fragrance mix 1, and fragrance mix 2. But her symptoms go far beyond contact dermatitis; she's affected by airborne exposure to fragrance, which can result in not just burning, swollen eyes but also an itchy throat, hives, physical exhaustion, and migraines that can last for days. "At first, my reactions were mild," says Oresky. "My eyes would just be dry and sting a little bit when I smelled strong scents, but it's gotten progressively worse. Every reaction I have seems to last longer and be more severe."

When we breathe in chemicals, whatever they may be, they interact with a system in the nose called the olfactory epithelium; it contains sensory neurons similar to the ones in our brains, and those neurons contain odor receptors. "You can think of these odor receptors like locks, and you can think of the chemicals you sniff in as keys," explains Sandeep Robert Datta, MD, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School who runs the Datta Lab, a research department devoted to studying the relationship between the olfactory system—the biological equipment that allows us to smell—and the rest of our bodies, particularly our brains. "Depending on which ‘keys’ or chemicals are present, some of the ‘locks,’ the receptors, are going to get turned on, and then the neurons are going to get turned on." From there, an electrical signal is created that travels to the brain.

Which brings us to Oresky's other diagnoses: MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity) and MCAS (mast cell activation syndrome). For reasons we don’t yet fully understand, people with MCS and MCAS seem to have “locks” that set off the body’s fire alarm when “keys” that fall into the fragrance category are inserted. Both conditions are relatively under-researched, and our understanding of them continues to evolve, but they are increasingly classified as disabilities; a 2016 lawsuit solidified fragrance sensitivity as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and in Canada, MCS is considered a disability under the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Accessible Canada Act. And both, particularly MCS, can result in reactions to fragrance with varying degrees of severity.

"[The perception of] MCS is like MS was fifty years ago—it's been so hard to get some credibility and belief," says Shelley Petit, chair of the New Brunswick Coalition of Persons with Disabilities (NBCPD) and a former teacher. "I get it. If I didn't have MCS, I'd be like, ‘They're nuts,’ right? It's a hard disease and disability to understand." Petit believes it was long-term exposure to mold in the classroom where she taught that triggered her MCS. It started, she says, with mild symptoms, usually just a headache. But over the years, her reactions to fragrances progressed. "I started having problems breathing," she says. After a while, she started tasting fragrances before she could smell them; her students knew that if she started to lick her lips, it was a sign she would soon have a reaction.

The cause of MCS is still not fully understood; often, people begin experiencing symptoms after a single event of severe chemical exposure (one 2000 joint study from the University of Iowa College of Medicine, the Iowa City Veterans Affairs Medical Cent