Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations Part 3: Scent for a Night Hunter and Scent for a Dirt Femme
Helloooo my darling baby scent addicts! It’s time for another edition of Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations. This is a recurring column where I answer some of y’all’s questions about perfume and offer up my best recommendations to help you smell hotter, richer, meaner, gayer– whatever you’re going for!
Each column kicks off with a perfume recommendation from me for an incredibly specific queer scenario, and then we get to reader questions.
If you’re new here and wondering why we’re talking about perfume, please check out my Why Perfume post, and then come back here, because I wanna sniff the collar of your shirt!!
Scenario: So You Want to Warn That When You Bite Necks, You Draw Blood
Biiiitch, I know you. You’re sexy. You’re quieter than most of your friends. You’re great in bed, and also you would never say that to someone, because first of all, you value privacy, and second, you know that people who have it don’t need to announce it. No one ever approaches you first, and while that annoys you, it also makes sense, because you’re honestly a little bit scary.
Perfect.
This is what we’re going for!!! Everyone wants to be this! Mysterious, intimidating, aloof. Dangerous? MAYBE.
You need a perfume that lets your prey scent you on the wind– a deer lifting its head as you walk by, nostrils quivering, its whole body suddenly alert.
Coven by Andrea Maack is what you want.
There’s really no other option. Imagine you’re standing in a sunny field. It’s summer; it’s hot. Birds are twittering, the sky is cloudless. Up ahead, you see a thick forest, and you walk toward it. You’re going in– it would feel nice to cool off.
You walk into the forest, and it swallows you whole. The temperature instantly drops 30 degrees. It’s dark; the trees close overhead. Your eyes struggle to adjust.
It’s silent. No birds. No noise.
A stick cracks, close, and you whirl around, straining to see.
There’s nothing there.
But something’s in the woods with you.
That feeling? That’s Coven. This is it, homos: hands-down, one of my favorite perfumes, and also a perfume that queers, specifically, flip out about, going, “WHAT ARE YOU WEARING WHAT IS THAT” after hugging me, their eyes bugging.
Coven is green. It is damp soil. It’s rain pooling in the crevices between tree roots. It’s the smell of shadows lengthening as night approaches, the grass under your bare feet turning chill. With Coven, you’re the hunter, and your cover is the black forest. Cold, raw-mossy and dark, alive and flowing with the sap of bitter leaves, this is what you wear when you want to smell terrifying.
Reader Question: “How can I smell like I rolled around on the forest floor a state over from where a wildfire raged?”
-Dirt Femme
Jesus H, Dirt Femme, you all CANNOT keep giving me briefs like this, I WILL come over to your house and start tucking tiny sample vials in all the pockets of your pants!!!
OK, here are my recs for smelling like you had a lil’ romp in the woods near a bonfire:
Arso by Profumum Roma
Someone else shares your dream, Dirt Femme. Arso– which means “burned” in Italian– is the scent of damp, sappy pine burning. You’re gay-camping with your friends on a fall night; you’ve gathered soft, floppy pine needles, wood that’s a little too wet, and dead leaves. There’s dirt under your nails, and you strike a match with cold fingers. A trickle of smoke becomes a lick of flame, and suddenly the whole brush-pile ignites. You see the flickering faces of your friends across the fire and taste the smoke thick in the back of your throat. This is that.
Stand back– Arso’s a big perfume. A one-spray-and-you’re-done scent. It comes in wildly expensive 100 ML bottles, but oh my god, do not buy 100 mls of this stuff! You’ll NEVER get through it. Buy the much-cheaper 18 ml travel spray, and i swear to you it’ll last you years.
Now: If I told you I wanted to go to Rome on my honeymoon specifically to go smell everything at Profumum Roma, and we later walked away on unsteady legs, clutching only a bottle of Arso, would you believe me?
Yatagan by Caron
Here is the butch!!! version of what you’re looking for. Yatagan is a pine forest so dry that dropping a cigarette would turn it into the kind of wildfire you see on the news. Fire Danger Level: Extreme, baby!
Bitter with oakmoss and threaded though with a ribbon of acrid patchouli, Yatagan is a bit sharp to wear at first, but don’t give up. It dries down into something warm and resinous, like sap clinging to a flannel that still holds the scent of last summer’s bonfire.
Gay. Gaaaaaay.
Wild Card Rec: Bois d’Ascèse by Naomi Goodsir
Less forest, more WORLD’S MOST EXPENSIVE BONFIRE. One spritz of this, and you are alight in a holy blaze of money– church incense, fancy pipe tobacco, fine whiskey thick with peat moss, spices, logs burning in a huge marble fireplace. You are LAIRD OF THIS CASTLE and you stalk through its echoing halls! PITILESS ARE THE LAWS OF THESE LANDS!
Seriously though, Bois d’Ascèse is fucking good. A single spray of this on a soft winter scarf is enough to get you hugs that last a little too long, like verging-on-awkward-length hugs. As a bonus, I have found that most people cannot identify this scent as “perfume.” They genuinely believe that this is how you smell: like a really fancy fire.
And isn’t that all that we, as queermosexuals, have ever wanted?
That’s it for this week’s Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations! I’ll be back next time to answer more questions.
In the meantime…
Do YOU have a perfume question?
Ask me here on this form that is linked right here!
Byeeee!