![]() “Gardenias smell really feminine to me, but I was inspired by the idea of a gardenia in a man’s lapel, so I gave it a twist with a lot of masculine codes, without sacrificing the flower,” Huber said. The brand’s website allows you instead to filter fragrances online by scent family, places, style, or “time,” which features categories like “Medieval” and “Disco” and “Art Deco”-but not by “women” or men.” This is a conscious attempt to be gender-neutral in marketing still, Huber find finds himself exploring elements of gender in scents like “Boutonnière No. This is true even for perfumers like Carlos Huber of Arquiste, who doesn’t categorize his fragrances by gender. Our own associations are strongly shaped by experiences, codes, and expectations smells like leather and tobacco might remain coded as “masculine,” while we’re coded to think of rose as “girly.” So to use these ingredients is inherently to explore gender and its attendant expectations, even if we admit they’re completely constructed. ![]() The idea that it’s possible to encompass these nuances of gender expression and performance in a fragrance is a testament to how thoroughly gender remains intertwined with perfuming. ![]() I tried to picture this man: someone who takes himself seriously but not too seriously-maybe leather shoes with brightly-colored socks. It overlays traditionally masculine and feminine elements into a portrait of gender that’s more maximalist than minimalist. Rock River Melody has rich, complicated smell, one that’s fresh, spicy, and even a little bit floral and sweet. “And second of all, what ingredients and notes represent that kind of masculinity?” She settled on notes of green sap, galbanum, hedera ivy, bergamot, narcissus, rose, patchouli, cedar, sandalwood, amber and musk. “There was a whole challenge: if I’m going to talk about masculinity, what kind of masculinity am I interested in?” Raza said. Neither smells like a men’s perfume from the 80s or 90s. ![]() New colognes like Rock River Melody and H24 are, in some sense, reacting against this hyper-macho landscape. The ad implies a fragrance so masculine that it’s almost dangerous-a kind of talisman that could transform a man into being both sexually irresistible and physically strong, someone whose masculinity was beyond question. The spot ends with the man, in suit and tie, frozen in a karate stance. She is immediately so taken with the smell of his aftershave that she starts to attack him he has to fend her off. In one ad from the late 1960s, for a scent called “Hai Karate,” a mild-mannered man walks through a door into a woman’s apartment. Because perfume had come to be seen as a largely feminine indulgence, advertisements for men’s fragrances amped up masculine stereotypes to an almost absurd degree. Gendered marketing accelerated in the twentieth century. “After years of seeing the unisex aesthetic, I thought it was an interesting time to bring the idea of gendered notes and ingredients back into the conversation.” “I wanted to do something different,” she said. Raza felt like this was getting a little boring. “Around 2005, you would go to the perfume counter at Barney’s, and everything looked the same, all the bottles were lab-like or apothecary-like, and the aesthetic was about not marketing to gender,” said Alia Raza, who founded the boutique perfume house Régime des Fleurs in 2014. But the turn towards gender neutrality was incredibly influential in the way perfumes were marketed and discussed. This was only a high-end corner of the market, of course- David Gandy’s white Speedo never went anywhere. ![]() (" That perfume you smell everywhere," as the New York Times put it.) This trend may have reached its zenith with the 2010 release of Le Labo's Santal 33, which soon became ubiquitous on millennials of all genders. After a century of scents were marked in line with gender stereotypes-roses are for girls tobacco is for boys-perfumers began to move increasingly toward “unisex” scents. Its slogan was, “One for all.”ĬK One was one of the first mass-produced fragrances widely marketed to both men and women, and its explosive popularity kicked off a new era in perfuming. The idea was that CK One was not a “cologne” or a “perfume,” but rather as a gender-neutral “fragrance.” It came in a spare, translucent bottle. In ads for CK One, the iconic 1994 Calvin Klein fragrance, groups of men and women, many of them shirtless, mingled in frayed denim and leather boots. ![]()
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