‘There are no perfumes for men and women. It’s all just perfume,” says Alessandro Gualtieri. He is the nose of the Dutch perfume brand Nasomatto. So he is the one who creates the smells. And those are all unisex scents, not aimed at either men or women. ‘The whole tradition of relating a scent to a gender arose purely as a marketing technique,’ says Gualtieri. “And as far as I’m concerned, it’s very old-fashioned.”
There are more and more noses like Gualtieri these days. Major perfume houses such as Hermès, Guerlain, Dior and Armani have built up high-quality perfume lines that are emphatically unisex in recent years. Like the original Eau de Cologne, the citrus-rich cologne, two centuries ago was also intended for both men and women
Women’s perfume is smart marketing
Yet the average perfume shop still has a strong gender segregation. This aromatic segregation began at the end of the nineteenth century. Perfume manufacturers noticed that especially women from the emerging middle class spent more and more money on cosmetics. In order to entice them to make even more purchases, these companies are increasingly focusing on an effective message: if you really wanted to be a modern, sensual, attractive, feminine woman, you obviously didn’t buy a fragrance that all kinds of men also wore. But something that did justice to your femininity, something special for your.
Perfume for women? Then also for men!
That message caught on. Perfume grew into a woman’s thing, just like ointments and make-up. That created a new challenge. How to entice men to enter the perfume shop too? After all, many men are hesitant to appear too ‘feminine’.
The solution was as simple as it was genius: the creation of super-masculine perfumes. Since then, the key word in the perfume industry has not been aroma, but marketing. Because precisely because fragrances actually have no gender, perfume manufacturers have to pull out all the stops to evoke associations of masculinity and femininity in other ways.
Pink vs Blue
That starts with the name. You don’t have to smell a perfume to know what gender it’s aimed at. In large letters it reads: For Men. Of Intense Man. Of Ideal man. And otherwise the color and shape of the bottle will remove all doubt. Perfume bottles for men contain dark colors and bold designs, as opposed to lots of pink tones and playful designs for women. Just as the models in the advertising campaigns clearly show which gender the perfume is aimed at.
Men smell like wood, women smell like flowers
And what about the smell itself? It’s going too far to say it doesn’t matter. In keeping with all the classic stereotypes, male-oriented perfumes are more likely to contain ingredients that are perceived as ‘heavy’, ‘deep’ or ‘rough’, such as tobacco, wood, amber and spices. Women’s perfumes, on the other hand, are more often sweet, fruity and floral. These associations are partly self-perpetuating. Precisely because certain ingredients have been used in ‘female’ perfumes for years, we think with similar fragrances: oh, that is a feminine perfume.
Flowers for the man
Dior demonstrated a few years ago that you can easily break through these stereotypes. The French fashion house launched a perfume that smelled like face powder, partly thanks to a strong iris scent. There is traditionally nothing masculine about that. But because they smell Dior for men put the liquid in a dark blue bottle and arranged some male models for the advertising campaign, Dior managed to make this face powder perfume a success among men.
Many perfume lovers are therefore not distracted by the gender on a package and try everything. Something that Gualtieri strongly encourages. ‘Every fragrance in the world can be liked by women and men. You should not let an advertisement or store employee tell you what suits you or not. The great thing about perfumes is that every nose is different and everyone experiences scents in their own unique way.’