What determines whether a perfume is considered masculine or feminine?
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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.
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