GENDER fluid
Fashion has ripped old ideas of gender to shreds, and now it’s the fragrance world’s turn to ask what femininity really means. As a whiff of androgyny comes to a perfume hall near you, Alice Wignall explains why scents are finding a whole new sensibility
When I was at an impressionable age, I read a book in which the object of the hero’s affections enters the room wearing a gardenia perfume. The book describes how, combined with the vision of his beloved, his mind was ‘clouded into numbing and exquisite confusion by the thick, sweet fragrance’. The fact that more than 20 years later, on my dressing table sits a bottle of Estée Lauder Private Collection Tuberose Gardenia, is no coincidence at all. Despite the fact that I don’t like the smell of gardenia, in some corner of my mind, it is luscious, arousing, elegant – what Real Women smell like.
Isn’t that weird? Gardenia is a flower, not a female. Nor is rose, jasmine or violet. The smell of common ingredients in ‘female’ fragrances – sugar, fruit, sweetness – aren’t ‘feminine’. They’re things that grow on bushes or are used as baking ingredients. They shouldn’t immediately conjure up the image of a woman. There’s nothing to say, either, that leather or wood scents have to mean ‘male’. But more often than not it does in fragrance, and has for the last 100 years or so at least.
That trend may be over. The latest in the Chanel Les Exclusifs range, a unisex fragrance called Boy, ‘challenges tradition’ and ‘transcends gender’. The coolest niche brands are unisex, and increasingly, ingredients tagged for men are nudging their way into formulations targeted at women.
Wearing perfume is not a modern invention: the Greeks and Romans were known for it. But up until the 19th century it was generally a unisex affair, with men and women sharing the same smells. Then it changed: strong scents of all kinds were discouraged and when fragrance was worn, women smelled like flowers and men like wood or citrus.
So if you reach unthinkingly for ‘feminine’ scents, stop: it’s an artificial and relatively new construct. As Dr Rachel Herz, cognitive neuroscientist, psychologist and author of The Scent Of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell, says, ‘It has a lot to do with cultural concepts that reflect what men and women would be doing [at that time]. Men might be working in the fields, women were more associated with flowers and fruits. There’s nothing intrinsically valid about these associations, any more than the idea that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. Response to scent is a learned behaviour.’
Lizzie Ostrom, author of Perfume: A Century Of Scents, says, ‘It was generally unacceptable for men to be “into perfume” but in the Forties and Fifties, marketeers overcame this by linking scent with acceptable hobbies to make it OK for a heterosexual guy. They took the motifs of the good life – whisky tumblers, fast cars, old libraries, chess sets, leather armchairs – and linked them with fragrance.’ But our scent preferences aren’t all borne out of advertising. When it comes to sex, smell is where it’s at.
Research done by Dr Herz has demonstrated that above looks or a sense of humour, smell is the quality that we find most attractive in others. ‘Our body odours are the external blueprint of our internal genetics,’ says Dr Herz. This might not be at the forefront of your mind, but for heterosexuals the search for a sexual mate is, biologically speaking, the search for a potential father: what you’re looking for is evidence that a future baby would be healthy. Evidence shows that women are most attracted to the scent of men with the most dissimilar genes.
Can you see the problem here? Wearing scent does nothing to aid this process – it masks our natural body odours. You can forget, by the way, about pheromones. Escentric Molecules may be the best-selling fragrance in Liberty, but there’s no known evidence to suggest humans have a pheromone response in the way that many animals do. The reason you get compliments when you wear it is because it smells gorgeous thanks to its massive dose of the synthetic ingredient Iso E Super, not because it’s doing a dance with your body’s chemistry.
But contemporary perfumery isn’t all about smelling nicer: pick a scent and chances are that nestling among the pretty flowers and delicate herbs is something altogether more… unrefined. Chanel No.5 contains florals, aldehydes (a synthetic note that gives the perfume its sparkling, effervescent feel) and an artificial approximation of secretions from the perineal gland of the civet cat, which has a musky, fecal odour. Indole is a synthetic fecal note – a big ingredient in Calvin Klein’s Eternity. Even perfumer Jacques Guerlain – who brought us big hitters of the early 20th century, including Mitsouko, Jicky and Shalimar – said perfumes should smell of ‘the underside of my mistress’.
Sex smells. And sometimes, our fragrances smell of sex. But mostly (unless you’re wearing Secretions Magnifiques by Etat Libre d’Orange, with its intentional whiff of semen) only a bit, and on the quiet. As Dr Herz points out, ‘In the context of a fine fragrance, those components are only a part of the mix, which can include up to 80 ingredients.’ And yes, you might know a fragrance that drives you wild but that’s because you’ve been trained to respond that way. ‘Our responses to scents are all learned,’ says Dr Herz. ‘In many countries, musk is thought of as sexy. In Latin America, they use it to scent toilet cleaner. In Argentina, musk is not going to make you take off your clothes.’
Women don’t buy Chanel No.5 because of a drop of civet excretions. They buy it because Marilyn Monroe said it was the only thing she wore in bed and because it’s shorthand for a certain non-threatening, sexy, feminine elegance that has less to do with the way it smells and more to do with the way it’s sold.
Charlie by Revlon, released in 1973, became a defining fragrance for women, but was that because of how it smelled? No. It was synonymous with the ‘new’ (liberated, career-minded) woman, the first to be advertised by women wearing trousers, the first to be advertised by an African American woman. The ad strategy, not the fragrance, made the impact.
Those trends are on the move again, and to an extent launches such as Chanel’s self-consciously unisex Boy are just repeating the trick of 1994’s CK One: in a largely gender-segregated market, you cause a splash by straddling the divide. There’s also the mainstreaming of niche houses (Tom Ford, Le Labo, Frédéric Malle and By Kilian have recently been bought by Estée Lauder), which has brought some gender flexibility into the perfume hall. Niche brands may create fragrances that are more towards the traditionally male or female ends of the spectrum but the packaging tends to be identical, and where there have been minimal advertising budgets there have been no square-jawed hunks or elegant beauties to tell you what kind of wrist this should be sprayed on. And so you’re free – or more free – to go where your nose leads you. I bought my husband Sicilian Wood by Tom Daxon for his birthday, but I’m just as likely as him to use it in the morning. This year, Byredo launched a fragrance without a name and no official list of ‘notes’, so as to be utterly without gender associations.
As Lizzie Ostrom says, ‘Certainly, the growth of niche fragrance has supported changing motivations behind why we wear perfume – not just to smell delightful or attractive, but to be intellectually piqued or taken on a journey. So that means that rather than wearing, say, an incense fragrance because we are told it’s “feminine” or “masculine”, we might also wear it because we love where it takes us – it’s a fragrance of atmosphere and place. That often has nothing to do with gender, and therefore frees us up to enjoy what we like.’
Nonconformity is the new fitting in. I avoid mass-market floral scents because I don’t want to smell basic. (Ironically, I’m not alone in this: a few years ago, every independent-minded fashion woman I met was wearing Chanel’s smoky, masculine Sycomore.) In an era where women don’t want to be defined by gender, we want fragrances to represent that.
It’s not that the role of scent in our lives has changed, it’s just that our roles have changed. Once upon a time, smelling right would have meant smelling feminine – and that’s no longer the case. Which means that the perfume hall just got 50% bigger. Time to get exploring.