Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations: Pride Edition (Round 1)
wait'll you hear the name of this rec
Helloooo all you little gay angels! I’m back from Scotland, and it was wonderful.
The friends!
The food!
The highland coos!
The regular forced marches up and down mountainous wilderness areas with zero regard given to my specific, emphatic, and repeated requests that we not go hiking!
What a time. We’re home now, and that means:
My job keeps emailing me???
It’s time for another edition of Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations. And I have a little treat for you: We’re doing a two-parter! This week, we’ll have TWO rounds of perfume recs – one today and one on Friday.
For Pride! Because it’s Pride month! And what could be more important than giving careful consideration to exactly how you’re gonna smell at Pride???
Nothing!!!! There could not possibly be anything more important!!
Today, we’re gonna deviate a little from our normal format, and it’s because I want to talk to you.
There’s something you need to know about. Something we all need to know about.
Are you ready? (You’re not.)
There is a perfume called Gay Juice.
You heard me.
Gay Juice!?????
COULD THERE BE ANY PERFUME MORE PERFECT FOR PRIDE???
There could not! Look at that fruity-ass bottle. Look at that shiny orange cap, like a creamsicle lollipop begging to be licked! See the mountain at the bottom of the glass? That’s a peak. Gay Juice is Peak Gay. We’re there! We’re at the summit!
When I smelled Gay Juice for the first time, I felt something. A queer muscle memory, surfacing.
Gay Juice is a bottled moment. To me, it’s Pride, captured – it’s that ::very special:: moment at Pride when you begin to give in to the chaos in the most fun way possible. You know what I’m talking about – you’re hot, you’re sweaty, you’re covered in a sheen of sunscreen and glitter, you’ve maybe??? taken drugs or ingested far, far too much iced coffee, your skin is slick, it’s 90 degrees, you’re looking for your friends, your feet hurt, oiled-up gay boys in harnesses are jostling you on all sides, you just saw someone you slept with in 2017, you need water and the only liquid you can find is a $13 plastic cup of lethally alcoholic sangria. Waving your money in the air, you grab the sangria and down it in one go. As the drink drips down your arm and stains your shirt, as you’re slurping the cold fruit chunks and thinking "goddamn this is the best thing i’ve ever had”, it hits you that you haven’t eaten anything all morning, that maybe the sangria wasn’t the best idea but OOPS IT’S TOO LATE NOW and you get swept up in the crowd, dancing with strangers, locking eyes with a shirtless Dykes on Bikes rider, making out in the middle of the street, and everywhere, everywhere is the heat and the sweat and the noise and the smell of fruit and sunscreen and hot concrete.
Gay Juice is that. It’s hugely, sluttily fruity, with an almost gritty tanginess that reminds me of the way neon Pixy Stix powder feels in your mouth. In one sniff, you get hyper-realistic, dripping pineapple chunks, a mouthwateringly juicy mandarin note, a woody facet, and a richness of coconut to round things out. There’s a zingy ginger note, along with a bright orange blossom floating on a tropical-paradise ylang ylang breeze. The whole thing is set on a sturdy base of vanilla, vetiver, and a sexy musk, and if you’re thinking “this sounds too sweet, I won’t like this,” I’m here to tell you that Gay Juice is not actually sweet, per se – this is a puckery, sour fruit, good-times-in-a-tiny-outfit situation, a hot pink fishnet crop top of a perfume, friendly and ready to open-mouth kiss with whoever. It lasts for hours – six hours on my skin on a hot day, to be exact – and I will be drenched in it for all of Pride this year.
I was so taken with Gay Juice – I mean, I wanted it because of the name; I was not expecting it to be a ROCK SOLID HOMOSEXUAL DELIGHT – that I needed to know more. Who was behind Gay Juice?? How did it come to be?
The answer was someone named Cristóbal – that’s the person who created Gay Juice.
Cristóbal was kind enough to answer my hyperventilating questions about Gay Juice; read on for more!
Hi Cristóbal! I am obsessed with the name of this perfume, WHY ARE YOU SO PERFECT, and how did you decide to give us all exactly the perfume we needed?
First off, let me say how excited and humbled I am to be featured on O Caftan My Caftan – I am in love with your words and the way you bring life to fragrance through the queer lens. Thanks for the opportunity to share my story with your readers!
Picture this: It was a blue sky afternoon in June 2022 on a paisley picnic blanket in Brooklyn's Prospect Park when the idea for Gay Juice floated down to our gathering. We were toasting the birth of a friend who happened to have a copy of Larry Mitchell's "The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions" and read a few pages aloud. To me, the writing, along with Ned Asta's illustrations, captured something fundamental about the queer experience in the 1970s and left me with a longing to experience that time in our history when the idea of queer love was itself a radical notion. Over the past 60 years, so many of the political and social dimensions of the queer experience have been diluted as queer culture is subsumed by the machinery of capitalism. Fragrance is time travel, so I wanted to create a perfume that functions as a sort of gay time machine that connects us with that era and those ideas.
What's your background in perfume-making? (How do you know how to do this?)
I'm a self-trained perfumer. I first got involved in formulating after reading a Mandy Aftel book I'd picked up from the public library in 2014. Like a lot of amateurs, I learned by doing and navigating the often contradictory DIY forum posts of Basenotes.com. I also took a course under Virginia Bonofiglio at the Fashion Institute of Technology that was incredibly helpful in getting exposure to working perfumers and my first lab experiences. Because the fragrance industry is built on trade secrets, so much of the know-how is gate-kept behind corporate walls and wealthy French families, so it takes quite a bit of effort to wade through all the misinformation out there and find really useful instruction. There are schools, of course, in Europe, but those are more oriented for perfumers with organic chemistry training who want to go work for a big corporate fragrance house and less so for independent artisans. Perfumery also tends to attract a more introspective and private personality type, so I must admit I was pretty lucky to find a few generous mentors along the way who guided me at critical steps in the journey. Last year, I opened an olfactive laboratory in Bushwick called FUME, where we make Gay Juice and MICA (my Sonoran Desert inspired fragrance line) as well as make fragrances for other brands. More information about that project is at fumefragrances.com
Did you know off the bat how you wanted Gay Juice to smell? Like, was it a fully formed idea in your head before you ever made it?
This is something I learned from the process of making Gay Juice - it's very helpful to have a clear brief when you start working on a fragrance, with your key notes identified and a target overall fragrance profile. The initial concept for the Gay Juice formula was a loose sunscreen motif with citrus/pineapple, benzyl salicylate, and orange blossom intended for the peak of summer. However, given my inspiration was an era of the queer lived experience, I did more research on the aroma chemistry used in the 60s and 70s, during which time a lot of the more ubiquitous fragrances were experimenting with novel musks and new woody notes. This would have been laid against a canvas of skin scented with patchouli and incense. Pretty quickly, this led me to begin experimenting with earthy and musk notes like vetiver, sandalwood, ambrette seed dipped in a rich amber accord, which are all present in Gay Juice and key to its longer wear. I also use a lot of Comoro Island ylang ylang oil, so it has an exotic floral quality that makes an exquisite accord with vetiver.
How many versions of this formula did you go through before arriving at the correct formula?
SO MANY. I made around 80 versions of Gay Juice over the course of a year. One of the hardest parts of making a fragrance is knowing when to stop tinkering. By the spring of 2023, I'd narrowed it down to five concepts that were all candidates for the final formula and to help make the decision, I invited a bunch of friends to a smell party called "Sniff Sniff" and had everyone vote for their favorite. The winner is what we ended up producing in the end!
What is your favorite part about how it smells?
My favorite part of Gay Juice is how complex it is for a fruity floral fragrance - the wood and musk notes give it an earthiness that grounds it in the 70s and places it well outside the gender binary. If you like pineapple, this is not your typical canned fruit kind of candied note, but it captures the wax and rind facets for a more photorealistic and gritty pineapple.
Has anyone given you a memorable comment about how they perceive the ~aura~ of Gay Juice?
I'd feel like you'll probably have the best description yet, but I think my favorite comparison I've heard so far is "I smell like a slutty hippie that just rolled up to the beach with piña coladas after an orgy behind the dunes.”
What are you brewing up next for us homos???
I have an eternal obsession with green notes, more specifically tomatoes fresh off the vine. The next fragrance coming from Gay Juice will be a vegetal/green fragrance inspired by a rather loose character from the Lavender Hill Commune written about in Larry Mitchell's book. We're in the final rounds of that fragrance, and it will be available to smell in late summer. You can learn more about that release by following us on @gayjuicebk or joining our mailing list on gayjuicebk.com!
***Krista here, now, and I just want to say thank you to Cristóbal for telling us all about how Gay Juice came to be! I love this story.
And as it turns out, I also read the exact same formative Mandy Aftel book about perfume that Cristóbal mentioned, at around the same time, and I am now wildly, unspeakably upset that I did not go on to found my own perfume laboratory where we brew custom gay perfumes. Why didn’t I think of that?!
Great job, Cristóbal! Keep making perfume for the queers!
And y’all: If you’re at Pride in Minneapolis? Come say hi and sniff me!!
💖If you live in the U.S. and you’d like a lil’ sample of Gay Juice, leave a comment below and I’ll pick a winner at random to send some to!💖
🌈UPDATE: The winner of the Gay Juice perfume sample is Jo! Jo, I’ll message you on here to get a good mailing address🌈
First: love the photos from Scotland! My condolences on being forced to go hiking; that sounds dreadful.
Second: what a fun perfume!! Your descriptions really brought it to life for me. This is definitely on a Christmas wish list for me now. Please consider me one of the masses asking to be entered into the sample giveaway!
Happy Pride!!
Waaant! Can't wait to see how the new green perfume turns out, too!