What determines whether a perfume is considered masculine or feminine?
In: 8
The marketing.
And to a lesser extent, the scents used.
Sandalwood, for example is quite common in men’s fragrances, as the industry has deemed men’s fragrances to be more earthy, whereas women’s fragrances are lighter and more floral.
But this was all just made up by someone at some point and continued on when the descriptions proved marketable.
Id assume maybe they get like 200 random people and tell them to smell something and see whether or not they think it would be on a man or woman and go from there
Mostly just the standards and conventions of what men and women typically wear.
Men often wear musky/heavy/wood-y/earthy smells, women are typically expected to have floral or fruity or otherwise sweet lighter smells.
But there’s no factual or scientific reason that sandalwood is “more masculine” than oranges or something. It’s just convention/tradition, like blue/pink for boys and girls.
It’s arbitrary in the same way that blue for boys and pink for girls is arbitrary. Like blue for boys and pink for girls, it’s also a fairly recent development. (The gendered idea of colors for children formed in the early 1900s.) People didn’t used to think of perfumes in gendered terms, but the shift started in the late 1800s and was cemented in the 1950s because of mass marketing.
Functionally speaking, that’s resulted in people associating sweet, fruity, and floral scents with women while associating musky, woody, spicy, and sometimes “fresh” scents with men. Woody/spicy perfumes for women often include sweet notes to make them “feminine.” I’d guess that it may have shaken out that way since fruit and flowers have long been associated with femininity, plus there’s a societal narrative that women are metaphorically sweet. But I don’t actually know.
Though all perfumes and colognes are technically unisex since no scent can be gendered aside from the literal scent of a gendered person’s body, the idea of unisex scents has come back into style as stringent enforcement of gender roles has decreased in many societies.
My favorite perfume, Terre d’Hermes, is actually a cologne aimed at men. I wear it even though I’m a woman who presents in a feminine way, and I encourage everyone interested in perfume/cologne to wear whichever scents make them happy.
My thing is, if you like the way something smells, why not buy it for yourself instead if someone else? Like… you nit gunna be smelling your spouse all day, you’re gunna be smelling yourself all day lol
As someone that has a stress disorder triggered by certain smells it’s easy. A masculine perfume is one that triggers my symptoms and a feminine one is one that doesn’t. I describe it as alcoholic (masculine) vs sweet (feminine) if that makes sense.
Of course there is a continuum and certain scents can be masculine for one brand and feminine to another.
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