Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations Part 1: Scent for a House Party and Scent for a Sea Monster
let's break some hearts tonight
Gooood morning, my babiest scent angels! It’s time for the first real edition of Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations, 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 will kick off with a perfume recommendation from me for an incredibly specific queer situation, and then we’ll 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 smell your wrist!!
Scenario: So You’re Newly Single and Going to a House Party and Your Crush Will Be There (and Also Lots of Your Friends Are Poly and Some of Them Are Cute to You)
Congratulations, my darling! You are this right now:
and EVERYONE knows it. Everyone knows you’re available. Queers in the next state over have heard about your breakup. There are people who’ve been waiting years for this moment, and they are plotting their opening moves as we speak.
You need to smell approachable. You need to smell warm and open. But you can’t smell basic; there must be something about the way you smell that’s unforgettable, something that lingers in the back of everyone’s lizard-brain. Rasping. Edgy. Something they can’t pinpoint and need to smell again.
You need Ambre Fetiche by Annick Goutal.
Why? Because Ambre Fetiche is a warm, welcoming amber perfume – it’s vanilla, it’s benzoin, it’s sticky resins. (Amber perfumes, by the way, have nothing to do with the kind of amber that gets put in jewelry. Amber perfumes feature ingredients like styrax, vanilla, benzoin, patchouli, and labdanum– they’re typically warm and soft and friendly-sweet-smelling, and named for the color of amber jewelry.)
Ambre Fetiche is broadly appealing; everyone at the party will like it. They’ll be drawn to it. That’s the most important thing, here.
But. BUT. This is not like other easygoing ambers. There is a curious edginess to Ambre Fetiche. It’s an amber perfume, yes, but it’s mixed with the scent of cigarette ashes. The tiiiiniest amount of nastiness has been swirled into this, and it makes the whole thing glow– makes you glow, radiant with mystery.
Ambre Fetiche is someone’s rickety back porch on a cold night; a hot queer offering you their cigarette, their cold fingers brushing yours. You exhale into the dark sky together, silent.
This is a perfume for someone with a lot of rings. Someone who has recently felt the sting of romantic loss. Someone who’s looking for trouble.
That’s you, baby. Don’t hurt ‘em.
Reader Question: “What perfume would make me smell like an evil sea creature?”
-Nat
Guys, on the form where you can ask me a queer perfume question, Nat told me they were asking this for “personal reasons.”
I love this perfume column so much already.
Here’s the thing, though: There are a lot of evil sea creatures. Are we talking Ursula? Maybe a hot siren from Greek mythology, luring sailors to their doom? Perhaps a kraken or a giant squid. Maybe just one of those horrifying deep-sea fish with the light dangling over its face? Nat didn’t specify.
You know what? Doesn’t matter. Here are my recs for smelling like a dread monster from the deep:
Oud Minerale by Tom Ford
Did you know there are perfumes specifically designed to smell like the sea, but like, if the sea had a rock-hard boner for you? It’s true! This perfume is one of those – it’s in the “oceanic” or “marine” category of perfumes, and frequently, these kinds of perfumes really do have a sea-air to them, or a strange minerality that kiiiiiind of reminds you of licking a rock that’s been warmed by the sun. Oud Minerale is really good at this – it’s an oud, so there’s bit of skanky smokiness, a thickness at the back of your throat to it – and there’s the rock-lick feeling, and then there is this sexy, alien strangeness. That’s why I want you to try this. The alien strangeness, the marine-ness you’re smelling is a lab-reconstruction of a natural ingredient called ambergris, which is… a waxy substance produced in the stomachs of sperm whales. How much more sea-creature can you get?? (Nobody worry, real ambergris is illegal to have or use for perfume in the US.)
Do Son by Diptyque
Listen to me: this perfume is sopping wet. This is an evil sea creature – a siren – rising out of the shallows, huge white flowers clinging to its skin. Do Son smells like a pouring rain weighing down tuberose and jasmine blossoms, like creamy, thick-petaled florals heavy with water. I cannot think of a wetter perfume. Maybe you think you don’t like florals? I bet you like this. Do Son is hyperrealistic, dripping white flowers, and it is fresh, and it is also disturbingly sexy, because there is a musk in its base that smells like clean human skin. Definitely a perfume for a siren.
Wild Card Rec: Maai by Bogue Profumo
This is not the evil sea creature– it’s the ship the creature is hunting. Maai is a bit mossy at first – the walls of a wooden ship sea-damp with a hint of rot. Then it turns dark and slightly salty, then warm and smoky; very animal-like. It’s the scent of laying under furs in the hull of a ship tossed by waves; it’s how it would smell to cling to someone in the night as you cross the ocean, trying not to think about what’s out there. Not a perfume for beginners, Maai is expensive, rough, and a little alarming. Lasts forever, and no one you get near will have smelled anything like it.
That’s it for this week’s Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations! I’ll be back next Friday to answer more questions. (So many of you wrote in! I’m so excited!)
In the meantime…
Do YOU have a perfume question?
Ask me here on this form that is linked right here!
Ta ta for now!
Absolutely deliriously delighted that this is a reoccurring column — and especially can’t wait to learn more about specific ingredients! I once took a scent design workshop from a beautiful and mysterious Québécois woman; we had to identify like 50 different scents and then create our own room spray based on a brief (mine smelled like wet gutter leaves sprinkled with vetiver, it was embarrassing), but now I’m HOOKED.