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Vada, Brittany AldeanDateInMeta 23, 2026Beauty / Beauty FeatureWhat does MAGA smell like?

Fragrance has become a new political currency in Trump’s America, as a new wave of products reassert traditional ideas about gender

ShareLink copied ✔️July 23, 2026BeautyBeauty FeatureJuly 23, 2026Text Nessa Humayun

If the MAGA movement had its own Hailey Bieber, it would be Brittany Aldean. In April, the influencer, better known as the wife of country music singer Jason Aldean, launched her perfume line, Vada, to cater to Republican women who are “rooted in red, white and blue”, “faith-based” and have “good values”. According to the brand, this large cohort, with its massive spending power, has been overlooked by a $22 billion industry.

It’s only natural that MAGA, with its infamous Mar-a-Lago aesthetic (heavy make-up, bouncy blow-dries, puffy lips and immovable foreheads), is moving into scent. Everyone is. In the UK, fragrance has outpaced make-up and skincare to become the fastest-growing sector in beauty, while in the US it is expected to generate $9 billion in revenue in 2026, more than any other global market. But what does a MAGA-pilled fragrance smell like? Per Vada, it’s primarily saccharine: inoffensive notes of apple blossom, rose petals, “peach fuzz” and vanilla bean.

These notes come as no surprise to beauty writer and critic, Jessica DeFino, who says that a gender essentialism of the nose has long been entrenched. “The idea that florals and sweet gourmands are for women, while woods and gunmetal are for men; that framing is conservative, even if the scents themselves aren’t,” she tells Dazed, pointing to Vada’s Georgia Dream, which was apparently formulated for trad-wives, or “women who understand that power doesn’t need to shout.” Another Vada scent, Muse, aims to bottle a mother’s “unconditional love” with notes of bergamot, jasmine, and again: rose and vanilla.

“It’s bleak,” DeFino says. “[Georgia Dream] takes this idea of power and funnels it into perfume, which doesn’t confer any material power whatsoever. At the same time, it’s encouraging quietness. Your scent can be loud, so you don’t have to be… Perfume is invisible, but it’s incredibly effective at communicating whatever identity you want it to.”

Aldean, of course, is a vocal supporter of Trump, and the binary gender politics promoted by his administration. In 2022, she was accused of being anti-trans after posting an Instagram video of herself applying make-up, captioned: “I’d really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase.” She later told the conservative women’s magazine Evie that this backlash prompted her to launch Vada. The brand has continued to strike a nerve, though not in a bad way for its founder. At a pop-up event in red-state Georgia, women queued around the block to buy a bottle and snap photos with Aldean.

At its heart, fragrance is just a combination of chemical molecules; there is nothing inherently conservative or liberal about it. Those notes can, however, be wielded as political signifiers. Earthy patchouli, for example, was once a favourite among buttoned-up Victorians, but by the 1960s, it had become synonymous with the psychedelia-fuelled sexual revolution and counterculture movement. The latter association has endured, and can be wielded as a harmful stereotype. In 2015, E! News presenter, Giuliana Rancic, equated the dreadlocked hair of a then-18-year-old Zendaya with the scent. “It smells like patchouli oil,” she said. Another voice in the newsroom added: “Or weed”.

Likewise, over the past half century, certain notes have become associated with Republican women. “The strong avant garde chypres [a foundational family in perfumery] are preferred by an older demographic of Republican women,” certified UK fragrance expert, Aamna Lone tells Dazed. “Modern day, western conservatives are leaning towards a mix of very bold, sweet fragrances or ‘clean-smelling’ aldehyde profiles.” Case in point: Vada.

Trump Fragrances

Unsurprisingly, President Donald Trump and his daughter, Ivanka, have their own perfume lines. In 2025, the former debuted Victory 45-47, packaged in a gold bottle sculpted in his likeness. This past May, Trump sent the Syrian President, and former Al-Qaeda leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, refills.

Victory 47 is gendered right down to the wording: it comes in “men’s cologne” and “women’s perfume.” Per DeFino, the descriptions give a good overview of what the typical MAGA man and woman should aspire to: “For women, it talks about confidence, beauty, sophistication and subtle femininity, without really saying what the fragrance actually smells like. Those aren’t scent notes, they’re characteristics that are being nonsensically applied to perfume.” The cologne, on the other hand, is said to embody “strength, power and victory.”

Trump is not the first president to go down the fragrance route. Politicians seem to intrinsically understand that scent can signal allegiance and power. Emmanuel Macron reportedly applies “industrial” amounts of Dior Sauvage as a way of making his territory, while Margaret Thatcher wore a Penhaligon’s fragrance – a brand which also created a scent for her idol Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph.

During his presidential campaign, Richard Nixon’s Republican ticket released a promotional perfume for women called “GOPtimism”, which came in red, white and blue bottles and was labelled “the scent of victory”. While information about its notes has been lost to history, one can only assume they were similar to his wife, the future First Lady, Pat’s, personal favourite, Lanvin Arpège. While it first debuted in 1927, it carries many of the same hallmark notes Republican women love today: lily, peach, honeysuckle, jasmine, rose, vanilla and patchouli.

Melissa Rein Lively is the founder of America First PR, an anti-woke publicity firm, and an influencer within Trump’s orbit. A perfect embodiment of the MAGA beauty aesthetic, she tells me that her hyper-feminine look is a reclamation of femininity as a source of power. And though you can’t see it, perfume is an integral part of her regimen. “I would never leave home without it,” she says. “Conservative women are drawn to fragrances that feel timeless, polished and feminine rather than highly experimental. I think that preference reflects a broader appreciation for refinement, tradition, worldliness, and enduring style.”

Rein Lively’s favourite scents skew strong. This comes as no surprise to Jack Mason, the MAGA-identifying Republican behind The Perfume Nationalist, a podcast that explores culture and politics through the conceptual lens of fragrance. “Bold fragrances assert the wearer’s presence and taste without concern for the scent-phobic or dubiously allergic,” he tells me. “Scent was for many years viewed as an imposition on others’ space or even as an environmental pollutant, in keeping with the left-wing view of consumer luxuries as decadent. The confident use of scent as a personal statement is necessarily conservative because it says you don’t take the rules and sensitivities of twenty-first century people seriously. You move around in your own world.”

To mark the 2016 election, when Trump was first elected president, online perfume subscription service, Scentbird, combined state voting patterns with more than 400,000 fragrances orders to identify the most popular scents among Republicans and Democrats. The results also suggested that bold, long-lasting fragrances reigned supreme.

In her profile of Aldean, Evie editor-in-chief Brittany Martinez suggests that conservative women are underserved by the beauty industry. But that isn’t true, particularly when it comes to fragrance. There is no shortage of – typically saccharine – compositions that appeal to this large cohort. Fragrantica, the internet’s largest fragrance community, last year found itself at the centre of a political backlash, when founder Elena Knezevic hosted a giveaway for Trump’s fragrances, and on Independence Day posted a since-deleted image of George Washington wearing a MAGA-esque hat. Certain users swore to log off, but found themselves at a loss — Fragrantica remains the world’s most comprehensive scent database.

Nor do bona-fide Trump insiders feel underserved. While she’s open to try Vada, Rein Lively doesn’t feel the need for brands marketed towards her politics. “As Michael Jordan famously said, ‘Republicans buy shoes too.’ The same principle applies to beauty,” she tells me. “Conservatives buy perfume. Democrats buy skincare. Everyone wants products that make them look and feel their best.”

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