perfume and gender

[bonda]

so i've been reading a lot of perfume stuff lately and it's really interesting to me that even as someone says (and presumably believes) perfumes aren't gendered, they still will say 'masculine' or 'feminine' when describing a scent. why? i thought about it for a bit and i think it's cos it's a shortcut. not everybody knows what birchwood smells like but everyone has some idea in their mind of what a 'masculine' scent is. same as when calling something a 'grandma' perfume. and actually i think it's a terribly faulty shortcut, because it relies so heavily on connotation and personal experience/memory. for example, my dad usually smells like his proraso lozione dopobarba in rinfrescante (menthol & eucalyptus). if a person was talking about the scent of birchwood, and to them they define that as 'masculine,' so instead of describing the scent as birchwood they say 'masculine'....but my scent memory of 'masculine' is menthol & eucalyptus....then it's a bad description, right? so it's a heavily cultural andor lived-experience shortcut, and probably one that will have less and less meaning as people move away from gendered products (maybe i'm being idealistic about this but i do believe that's happening albeit slowly)....anyway yes just some thoughts i'm sure someone's thought of this before and been more eloquent about it but yar

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

Perfume enthusiast here via network… couldn't agree more! It's also so time-bound. What was fashionable in men's fragrance in the 2010s was not all the same as what was fashionable in the 1980s, for example, so you could very plausibly have two perfume enthusiasts of different ages insisting that eg aldehydes are or are not "masculine," because change occurs over time! Down with this sort of thing etc.