Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations: Scent for a Youthful Imprint and Scent for Chocolate Revenge
you'll spoil your dinner
Hello my adorable aromatic inverts! It’s time for another edition of Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations!
This is a recurring column where I answer some of your 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 whuffle your wrists like a bloodhound!
Scenario: So You’re Regularly Around a Queer Friend’s Child, and You Want to Imprint on Said Child
Congratulations, darling! You’ve made it – a close queer friend of yours has a kid, and you get to spend time with that kid regularly. You’re a gay auntie! (A gauntie?) A guncle! A queer elder in a child’s life! You’re officially in! 🌈
You’re going to have so much fun. Think of the snacks! The babysitting shenanigans! The movies, the music, the culture you can expose this bb to!
…But uh-oh! You have competition. Your queer friend likely has other queer friends who are thrilled about this kid. That means you’re not the only supportive queer adult in this child’s life.
And that’s great and healthy for the kid, but also?
I get it. I know. You want to be the preferred queer adult. The favorite.
Wellllll, we might have to cheat a little. Obviously you’re going spend lots of wholesome time with your lil’ buddy, and obviously you’re going to prove yourself a trusted companion over the years by being a good listener and an exciting activity partner, and obviously you cannot force a child’s love, but! we’re going to help your young friend imprint on you, using their sense of smell.
Sorry to all your rivals! Guess you’re just more fun!! 💅
Pour Un Homme by Caron is the scent of a lifelong friendship.
Children have a good sense of smell. They are also blunt and ignorant of the social norms that come with age, which means that children will cheerfully tell you if they hate the way you smell. Fortunately, this means they will also tell you if you smell nice. And if you smell really nice, children will attempt to inhale you, and snuggle you, and do these huge, theatrical sniffs into your hair and clothes.
That’s how I know that Pour Un Homme is, among all the perfumes I’ve ever tried, the definitive favorite of children. For years now, I have been experimenting with different perfumes and kids, slowly weeding out the losers, narrowing down the list of winners, and taking note of any unprompted childish comments about how I smell.
Pour Un Homme is the only scent I’ve tried that nearly every kid has liked. I get a lot of impromptu hangings-on and clingings when I’m wearing Pour Un Homme – a lot more than I’ve noticed with other scents. For instance, once, when I was wearing Pour Un Homme, a 4-year-old (who was under the table) started sucking on the cuff of my sweater before I could stop her, saying “It smells good,” when I politely inquired as to why. (She swiftly discovered that Pour Un Homme did not taste as good as it smelled.) At another point in my life, I was teaching kindergarten in Taiwan and wearing Pour Un Homme a lot, and if my cardigan was missing off the back of my chair, it could usually be found, post-naptime, inside the sleeping bag of one of my students, who liked to fall asleep cuddling it.
No wonder kids like Pour Un Homme. This is a classic “men’s” fragrance from Caron, a classic French perfume house, and it just smells wonderful. Simple and wonderful. First created in 1934, Pour Un Homme is a huge, whopping overdose of Provençal lavender paired with a glorious vanilla, and if that doesn’t exactly sound like a men’s perfume, well, once again: How stupid is it to assign gender to scent??
The key to this fragrance is how natural, how herbally sharp the lavender smells at first spray. One spritz and it’s LAVENDER, waving purple in the fields on a hot, dry day; lavender, fresh and arid under soaring blue skies; lavender when you’re burying your nose into a stalk of the real-ass plant; lavender, piercing and astringent, when you crush the flowers and leaves between your fingers.
Then comes the vanilla. You get a few minutes of that pure, fresh French lavender before you start to smell it: a sort of… fluffiness creeping in. Suddenly you have lavender on a bed of puffed white clouds; lavender-but-now-friendly, with all the sharpness ebbing away. There’s the vanilla. Ooh it’s gorgeous, even creamy, and ooh, it’s not just vanilla, is it? No, it’s an almost caramelly amber-vanilla, rich with opoponax and sweet styrax. MMMM.
Pour Un Homme’s drydown lasts for hours and doesn’t change much; you’ll be able to smell it, easily, on your clothes the next day. It’s so, so lovely – a featherbed of lavender and vanilla-amber and soft musks relaxing into one another. Not a sharp edge to be found; just pure comfort.
Wear Pour Un Homme once around a child (not a baby – babies don’t need your perfume) to smell good and kid-approved. Wear it consistently around a child you’re going to know for a long time, and your scent will become a core memory.
Spritz this one on to go hang out with the future.
Reader Question: “How do I smell deliciously like chocolate in a hot, androgynous, eat-you-up way?”
- Reclaiming Chocolate Vengeance
Well well WELL, Reclaiming Chocolate Vengeance! It just so happens I’ve got chocolate on my mind today, thanks to the mostly empty heart-shaped box of chocolates hanging out on my countertop right now!
Y’all, Reclaiming Chocolate Vengeance (RCV) writes that their ex abruptly ended their 10-year relationship in a cruel way. This ex also used to wear a men’s cologne that smelled wonderful and vaguely chocolatey, but which sadly smelled weird and sharp on RCV, who adds:
“I want scent memory revenge. I want to be the sexy, chocolatey one. I want to smell so damn good, my next object of affection can't help but take a bite! If I ever run into my ex on the street, I want to smell so delicious that she'll forever quietly regret what she did. (She won't, but this is my fantasy, so shhh.)”
RCV, I love this revenge chocolate brief, and have I got recs for you:
Chocolate Greedy by Montale
Your ex should probably just run home crying, RCV. Chocolate Greedy is everything you’re asking for and then some – an absolute indulgence of glorious rich chocolate. This is running your finger along the edge of a cake thickly frosted with chocolate ganache; this is biting into a truffle and finding the center warm and almost liquidly fudgy. Chocolate Greedy has achieved cult status among those addicted to gourmand (edible-smelling) scents, and it comes complete with swirling rumors of people having to fight partners off when wearing it.
If chocolate-chocolate is what you want, RCV, then this is the one to get. Chocolate Greedy opens with a HELLO HERE IS YOUR MOLTEN LAVA CAKE bang and then moves into a more vanilla’d, soft milk-chocolatey territory. It’s lashed with bitter orange, like those whack-and-unwrap Terry’s Chocolate Oranges you see around the holidays, and it’s got dustings of unsweetened cocoa powder and coffee to keep things feeling grown-up. Eventually (and this stuff lasts forever on your clothes and skin), you’re left with an aura of edibility, a sensual haze of being good enough to eat.
Try not to gnaw your own arm off, OK?
Amour de Cacao by Comptoir Sud Pacifique
Goddammit RCV, I am holding my bottle of Amour de Cacao in one hand and the last glossy piece of chocolate from my Valentine’s box in the other and I don’t know which one I want to eat more!!
Amour de Cacao is not deep, dark chocolate. It’s not a dense chocolate cake or a truffle. Instead, it’s the friendliest, softest milk chocolate imaginable. Amour de Cacao is easygoing; it’s a hot chocolate mix, frothed into a mug with milk and served with jet-puffed vanilla marshmallows. It’s delicious.
There are supposed to be notes of citrus and fruits in here, but I don’t smell them. All I smell is sweet, non-cloying chocolate and vanilla, best friends and lovers baking together in a warm kitchen. I wear Amour de Cacao in the winter, when it’s freezing, when the world seems friendless and devoid of cheer. It’s an olfactory antidepressant.
Spray Amour de Cacao on for joy and warmth and protection, but don’t be surprised when someone loses their mind over this one; I’ve had both cis men and queers ask me the name of this with a fevered look in their eyes.
3. Wild Card Rec: Fragrance Number 01 “Taunt” by DedCool
Full disclosure, RCV: Chocolate is not listed as an official note in Fragrance Number 01 “Taunt”.
But something about this perfume hits exactly like a chocolate scent. Like, right in the throat. There’s something mouthwatering in Fragrance Number 01, something sensual and warm, something sweet and edible and satisfying to sink your teeth into, something that feels chocolatey. Officially, this perfume is a vanilla amber, airy and fluffy, with bergamot and some floral notes (I guess??) thrown in to tone down the sweetness. Unofficially, it sits right next to all the other chocolate fragrances in my perfume cabinet, and nothing anyone can say will convince me it belongs elsewhere. This is a ghost chocolate; the vibes of chocolate without the cocoa. A shimmering chocolate hologram, there but not there.
And for no reason I understand, it is uniquely sexy. Fragrance Number 01 smells like you just got out of a hotel shower and lotioned up with Palmer’s Cocoa Butter and then got an in-room massage. It smells like your very skin is chocolate.
And people fucking love it! What a makeout scent!! My friend Marie gave me a bottle of this stuff last year and I’m already running low; I can’t stop!!! You won’t be able to stop sniffing yourself!
So your ex smelled great, RCV. And I respect you wanting a chocolate scent for revenge. But I also hope, with these, that you’ll walk around with a renewed sense of how delectable you are. In the heart-shaped box of life, babe, you’re the piece of chocolate that everyone wants. May you know what it is to be fought over and greedily devoured.
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!
Dammit Krista I have to try SO HARD not to just buy everything you recommend!
(Still in love with Encre Noir, currently enjoying Armani Stronger with You)
Wonderful recs as always!!!