Jean-Baptiste is an orphaned boy in 18th-century Paris born with an unprecedented, supernatural sense of smell, yet he completely lacks a personal body odor of his own. Rejected by society as unnatural from infancy, he survives a brutal childhood through sheer stubbornness and emotional detachment. His singular obsession with capturing and possessing the world's most beautiful scents drives his actions, making him view other human beings merely as vessels for raw olfactory materials.

Giuseppe Baldini is an aging, once-renowned master perfumer and glover whose shop sits on the Pont-au-Change. Struggling with irrelevance and a lack of original creative talent, he relies on mimicking others and purchasing formulas to maintain his wealthy façade. He represents the formal, measured science of perfumery, preferring exact measurements and classical techniques over raw instinct.

Antoine Richis is a wealthy, widowed nobleman in the town of Grasse. He is a shrewd, highly ambitious man who treats his exceptionally beautiful daughter as a pawn in his grand political schemes to secure a noble bloodline. Possessing a cold, analytical mind, he attempts to outsmart the unknown threat terrorizing his town by thinking like a predator himself.

Madame Gaillard is an emotionally stunted woman not yet thirty years old who runs a boarding house for children of all ages. Having suffered severe physical abuse in her own youth that deadened her internal emotions, she lacks all capacity for tenderness or malice. She operates her establishment with a merciless sense of order and justice, ensuring the children survive but offering them no comfort.

Grimal is a hard-driving tanner operating a dangerous riverside business in Paris. He routinely employs young laborers for the most hazardous and menial tasks in the tanning process, treating his workers more like expendable farm animals than human beings. He demands total obedience and enforces his will through the threat of severe physical beatings.

Laure is the highly guarded teenage daughter of Antoine Richis. Renowned throughout the region for her exceptional physical beauty, she possesses a scent that is entirely unique and overwhelming to those sensitive enough to perceive it. Her existence heavily dictates her father's political actions and the town's shifting atmosphere.

The Girl with the Plums is a young virgin whose extraordinary scent drifts through the streets of Paris and captures Grenouille's absolute attention. Her presence fundamentally alters the trajectory of his life, awakening him to his desire to possess and preserve human scent.

Druot is a journeyman perfumer who takes Grenouille under his wing when he arrives in southern France. He is more interested in carrying on an affair with his widowed employer than in completing his daily labors, willingly offloading the bulk of the difficult extraction work onto his quiet new assistant.

The Marquis is a nobleman and eccentric pseudoscientist living in Pierrefort. He firmly believes in a theory regarding a "lethal fluid" emanating from the earth and uses Grenouille's decrepit state as proof of his wild hypotheses. He is far more interested in his own academic glory than the actual well-being of the people he claims to heal.

Father Terrier is a highly educated priest at the cloister of Saint-Merri. While he initially dismisses superstitious claims about the devil, he quickly becomes deeply unnerved by the infant Grenouille's intense, scent-seeking behavior, opting to rid himself of the child as fast as possible by paying a boarding house to take him.

Jeanne Bussie is a wet nurse hired by the cloister to care for the newborn Grenouille. She is the very first person to recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong with the child, specifically noting his complete lack of the normal, comforting scent typical of human babies.

Madame Arnulfi is a recently widowed businesswoman operating a successful perfume shop. She is highly practical regarding her trade and relies heavily on her first journeyman to keep the business profitable while she quietly pursues a romantic relationship with him.

Chenier is the business associate and shop assistant to Giuseppe Baldini. He is well aware that Baldini's talents are failing but maintains a polite fiction to keep the business running smoothly, handling the actual customer interactions while his employer poses as a genius.

Pélissier is a highly successful and modern rival perfumer in Paris. Although he does not appear directly in the early scenes, his innovative and wildly popular scents drive Baldini to desperation and set the stage for Grenouille to prove his worth in the perfume trade.