The story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an unloved orphan in 18th-century France who is born with an exceptional sense of smell, capable of distinguishing a vast range of scents in the world around him.

Unknown to other people, Grenouille has a remarkable sense of smell, giving him an extraordinary ability to discern subtlest odors from complex mixtures of scent and across great distances.

Traveling to Montpellier with a fabricated story about being kidnapped and kept in a cave for seven years to account for his haggard appearance, he creates a body odour for himself from everyday materials and finds that his new "disguise" tricks people into thinking that it is the scent of a human; he is now accepted by society instead of shunned.

In Montpellier, he gains the patronage of the Marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse, who uses Grenouille to publicize his pseudoscientific theory about the influence of "fluidal" energies on human vitality.

Grenouille manufactures perfumes which successfully distort the public perception of him from a wretched "caveman" into a clean and cultivated patrician, helping to win enormous popularity for the Marquis' theory.

Despite his careful attention to detail, the police trace Laure's murder to him, and the hair and clothing of his previous victims are all discovered at his cabin near Grasse.

However, on the way to his execution in the town square, Grenouille wears the new perfume he has created from his victims, and the scent immediately causes the crowd of spectators to fawn in awe and adoration of him, and although the evidence of his guilt is absolute, the townspeople become so fond of him, so convinced of the innocence he now exudes, that the magistrate reverses the court's verdict and he is freed; even Laure's father is enthralled by the new scent and asks if he would consider being adopted as his son.

The magistrate reopens the investigation into the murders and they are eventually attributed to Grenouille's employer Dominique Druot, who is tortured into making a false confession and later hanged without ceremony.

He pours the bottle of perfume he created on himself, and the people are so drawn to him that they are compelled to obtain parts of his body, eventually tearing him to pieces and eating him.

"[3]The real-life story of Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta (1809-1863), also known as the "Tallow-Man", who killed several women and children, sold their clothes, and extracted their body-fat to make soap, resembles Grenouille's methods in some ways.

[4] That combination creates two distinguishable narrative lines[5] - the fantastic one, which is conveyed in Grenouille's supernatural sense of smell, his odorlessness, and fairy-tale tones in the story, as well as the realistic one, composed of the socio-historical circumstances of the plot and naturalistic descriptions of the environment, the perfume production and murders.

[7] According to Rindisbacher, the work "gathered together and phrased in popular terms the state of the art of olfactory and perfumistic knowledge and spun it into the realm of fantasy and imagination".

[9] He understands more through olfaction, rather than vision, and that is reflected in the language of the novel, as the verbs in the literature normally associated with visual perception relate, in Grenouille’s case, to the process of smelling.