hot girls wear vanilla and hot boys wear dior sauvage

gendering smells is CRAZY work + some recent purchases and updates

(This one’s too long to read in an e-mail if you’re reading from there. Growth <3)

even smells have pronouns.

I always have my parents take a sniff any time I get a new fragrance, which has been quite frequently as of late. My dad tells me to just give him the bottle cap to smell, rather than spray it on his wrist.

“I don’t want to smell like vanilla,” he says jokingly. 

I mentally roll my eyes, but make no attempt to argue because there’s really no point and I’m not gonna hold my dad hostage just so I can spray perfume at him. 

Still, it’s odd. Isn’t vanilla just something you get from a plant? Something you smell when cooking, or around Christmas time? A safe bet for an ice cream flavor? Most fragrances are made from ingredients that are just plants or their parts, but like most things–toys, clothes, colors–it seems to me that they are gendered almost arbitrarily so that you know which signs to follow the next time you go shopping.

I don’t remember the last time I heard of a popular perfume that was unisex that everyone wore without it inevitably leaning towards one demographic, though I’m sure one existed at some point and I may have just been too young to smell it. I’m fascinated by the way gendered signals morph depending on who you’re looking at. Would Paris Corner’s ‘Taskeen Caramel Cascade’ smell ‘feminine’ on a man with cleanly-cropped hair in a black business suit? Or would it be ‘sexy’, a label awarded to men for deviating from the norm in small, acceptable ways? 

What makes a smell ‘masculine’? Usually it’s that ‘woody’ note that we’re used to only smelling in colognes for men (at least in the West). But would it become feminine if the reverse were true? My dad let me swipe his bottle of Azzaro ‘Chrome Legend’ that he had abandoned in favor of Bond No. 9’s ‘Lafayette Street’ because I want to experiment with so-called ‘masculine’ scents (though I didn’t tell him that exactly). I still haven’t tried it more than once yet. Is it because it’s winter and fresh scents just aren’t the vibe? Or am I nervous?

(as with most colognes that thing PROJECTS baby pleasee spray with caution)

I was on the subway last weekend to go to The Cloisters Museum for an assignment, which means getting on one of the dreaded elevators that are wide enough to fit a crowd of tired commuters into its massive jaws. It was hot as fuck, I was pressed up against five different people, and every man was wearing the exact same cologne. I don’t know whether it was Dior Sauvage or one of the other Blue Bottles of Masculinity, but if you’ve smelled one you’ve smelled them all. It had me huffing nothing but straight bergamot and cedarwood the entire way down.

Make no mistake: I don’t hate that kind of scent profile, but men seem to wear it like an identical uniform. I mean, even high school girls at least wear different kinds of Bath & Body Works and VS PINK body mists. I could always tell who was next to me based on whether I was smelling ‘Warm & Cozy’ or ‘Sweet Pea’ (hate ‘Sweet Pea’ by the way. ‘Sweet Pea’ enjoyers do NOT interact). I’m a little less in-tune with what women who aren’t liberal arts college students in their early twenties are wearing, but when I walk down the street I’m not smelling YSL ‘Black Opium’ or Burberry ‘Her’ on almost every single woman I walk past (though I hear the former is quite popular at the club; I’ll have to take y’all’s word for it). When I went to the museum, though? I was subsequently drowned in the same sea of men’s fragrance as on the subway. Not even the medieval unicorn tapestries are safe!

I have no sweeping arguments to make about this phenomenon because its cause is quite obvious (gendered marketing), but it’d be a great relief to my nose if the average dude simply wore other smells sometimes <3

Moving on!

scents that pissed me off last month:

1. Okay, so back in October, I took the train up to Harlem Fragrance to check out what I could buy in an actual store instead of, say, Amazon in the middle of an ADHD-induced impulse buying spree. I was delighted to hear that the shop owners spoke (African) French, though they themselves didn’t figure that out until one gave me directions and I actually moved accordingly. I bought some dupe oil of a Killian fragrance (‘Love, Don’t Be Shy’ I think?) and Al-rehab’s ‘Aroosah’. I really should’ve figured out based on the packaging that it would be a floral fragrance, but I was just excited to have gotten something. I don’t think I’d even hate it as much if it wasn’t so strong, my goodness. It’s the type of powdery floral that makes me gag; automatic 0/10 from me. It’s been sitting in my desk drawer this entire time as punishment. Small positive: it helped me realize that I also despise herbal scents. Go figure.

2. Also in October: I ordered Lattafa’s Yara ‘Moi’ for my birthday, thinking I’d be getting a light and creamy sister to the original pink ‘Yara’ bottle on first spray. Yara leans more fruity and strawberry-forward on me, but based on reviews it seemed that ‘Moi’ was gonna lean more towards the whipped cream and caramel sweet-floral side of things. I had it sent to my home address, so I didn’t get it until I got back from campus and was super excited to try it. It was…disappointing, to say the least. At first it just smelled broadly floral (my beef with powdery florals continues) and very similar to one of my mom’s Mary Kay fragrances. I still took it with me back to my dorm, opting to pair it with sweeter scents and maybe keep it in the aforementioned Punishment Drawer to allow the scent to develop. I will let you know the results of my efforts later…

   

   mary kay fragrance in question. the bottle is sooo cute

smell updates:

Yara ‘Moi’ has been redeemed and can finally leave the dark dungeon of my drawer! Yes, you heard that right, I like it now. Like with the original Yara, it needs some time to develop before you get the actual scent that you paid for, so you gotta age it like cheese. I get the ‘creaminess’ that everyone was talking about now in the sense that it’s light and vaguely sweet, though it contains no vanilla note to my knowledge. I don’t quite get the caramel yet, but I’m starting to detect some of that peach in the opening!

I can smell the cinnamon in the ‘Choco Musk’ spray now. Remember when I said I couldn’t detect anything but the chocolate and vanilla (and something lactonic)? It seems I can now detect just a hint of spiciness when I first spray it before it settles into something warm and cookie-like! Yay <3

rapid-fire list of scents on my wishlist

• Sorce - ‘The Cookie Party’, ‘Match Made in Heaven’, ‘Snow Moon Magic’, and ‘Serpentine’; The former three are your standard “smell like a dessert”/ “smell like Christmas” gourmands whose notes I will picture below in order. ‘Serpentine’, however, appears to be a nutty, woody(?) fragrance that also contains sweeter notes like vanilla, fig, and honey along with…Iso E Super? I haven’t tried a fragrance with that note/chemical yet, so I got curious enough to order a sample! Call me an ant or a sugar-addicted American - I don’t give a FUCK man I love sweet scents!! Some of y’all wanna smell like blood and farm animals and I don’t judge, so don’t judge me either x

  

  The Cookie Party.

  

  Match Made in Heaven.

  

  Snow Moon Magic.

  

  Serpentine.

• Amouage - ‘Guidance’; Pretty pink bottle and pear notes I’m SAT. I’m also trying to get into Arab perfumes that aren’t just dupe brands (though I love me some Lattafa), and Amouage came up frequently in my search! Speaking of Lattafa, though…

  

• Lattafa - Eclaire; Yeah, yeah, ‘Bianco Latte’ dupe, ugly bottle, whatever (I honestly don’t really care about how perfume bottles look because I don’t display them or take em anywhere with me). I just need one fragrance that’s just straight vanilla and caramel sweetness that actually projects, then I’m set.

  

• d’Annam - White Rice; I’m really curious about rice fragrances, so this one’s on my list! Would love to sample it. (Feel free to recommend me some rice fragrances that aren’t a hundred dollars </3)

  

• J-Scent - ‘On a Cloud’; Another note I’m curious about: mint/peppermint! I probably won’t buy a whole cabinet of mint perfumes but I wouldn’t mind smelling like it once in a while. I’m mostly curious about how it’ll play with sweeter notes. I’m very predictable. I’m also looking for more lactonic notes!

  

• Les Liquides Imaginaires - Blanche Bete (I know I’m spelling it wrong without the accent circonflexe I don’t have the French keyboard on my laptop </3); Speaking of lactonic notes, this is another one of the pricier scents on my wishlist. People won’t shut up about it so I may order a sample when I’m able to.

  

  Yeah that’s it! Thanks for getting all the way to the end and feel free to comment/quote with some of your favorite scents or scents whose notes upon looking at them make you wanna explode (in the positive way)

  Bonus: I made a carrd out of nostalgia for the short period of time where everyone on fandom twitter had one of those. Look how bad it is <3