Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations: Scents for Quite a Common Fetish, Apparently
IYKYK
Hello my fragrant fruitie-pies! 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!
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!
Today, gays, we’re throwing convention out the window. We’re tossing aside how we usually do this column.
And why????
Because, at this point, there are so many questions jammed into the 💌Queer Perfume Mailbox💌 So many!!! I’m not sure how much storage a google form offers, but y’all’s ability to shoehorn in juuuust a few more questions about perfume is unmatched.
Now, I love all the questions. And I love all of you for asking! and I want to get to every single question!!!
And I’ve been noticing a little… theme in the ol’ mailbox.
A wee pattern, you might call it.
So I’m asking you: My beloved freaks, do we have a problem?
-I teach at a university and I want to project “young hot in-charge nonbinary prof who no one can have.” Like you can look but you can’t touch, OK?
-Please tell me which perfume will make me smell like antique books and tweedy jackets and going to class in September.
-I'm looking for a daytime work perfume (I'm a college professor!) that hits my fave perfume notes but IS NOT too night time-sexy. I love vanilla, oud, tobacco in winter and rose, orange blossom, jasmine, grapefruit in Summer, but would love something for the teaching months (Sep-April) that is heavy and sweet (which I like and lean towards in fall/winter) but not too sexy cos its work!!
-Krista, I want to sleep with my professor. Please keep this anonymous but I do. She’s gay and i know for a fact she’s single. I’m going to her office hours each week and i don’t need help, but clearly i need help because i’m willing to drop her class just to do this, can you help me with a perfume for seduction? One-on-one office hours with a door that closes!!!
-I am a 19 year old butch. My femme loves the scent I already wear every day (straight patchouli oil, maybe sometimes mixed with amber). However! I want a fancier, more special-occasion scent with a little more nuance and complexity than JUST patchouli. In short: what scent would you recommend to a butch academic who spends their days studying comparative religion in vintage silk button ups and relaxes with a night at the opera with his (perfect, beautiful) femme lover?
-I went to an all-girls high school and of course I can’t really describe what I’m looking for, maybe something like fruity shampoo and fresh grass and clean laundry with some sort of a muskiness? I’m so sorry, it sounds like I’m looking for a Bath and Body Works locker-room body mist but I’m 36
-How can i smell like i just got fucked up against the shelves in a library?
You little academic sluts.
What is this???? This thirst for knowledge!!! My god. And this isn’t even all the questions—just a curated selection!!
Alright, I’ll help you. I’ll help you all! But only because school’s about to start up again, and I live in a college town, and I want the 10-student-deep line at my local coffeeshop to smell more sophisticated than whatever chemical-trash sugar-fruit garbage is currently being hyped up on tiktok. We can do better, and we shall!
TO THE STACKS!!!
For serious back-to-school, sexy academia vibes, I give you…
Eau Duelle (Eau de toilette) by Diptyque
There are lots of perfumes and candles out there that are supposed to smell like paper or books. Most of them… simply do not. (They do, however, smell like bad marketing copy and disappointment.)
But you know what does smell just like antique books to me? Diptyque’s Eau Duelle, especially in the eau de toilette formulation.
This perfume fucks in the library. A non-sweet, bone-dry-desert vanilla, so dry it’s approaching “dusty,” this is the scent of old reference books with translucent, thin, gilt-edged pages; the smell of 70s paperbacks with covers crumbling into your hands. The vanilla to try if you’re convinced you hate vanilla, Eau Duelle is here to offer you a brand-new point of view, much like a book you were assigned to read for class that ended up changing your life!
And why do old books smell so pleasantly of dry vanilla, anyway?
I’m so glad you asked!!! Old books smell wonderful because paper is made from wood pulp, which contains lignin—a compound that offers some sturdiness to plant wall cells. As books age, the lignin in the paper breaks down, and this process makes a compound called vanillin, which smells like—you guessed it!—vanilla. (And if you’ve ever sneakily torn the corner from a page of an old book and chewed it into a satisfying pulp, you know that old paper also tastes like vanilla, and that is why I was, at 11 years old, banned from borrowing any more of my dad’s old science fiction books.)
Anyway! someone online described Eau Duelle as a “vanilla gin martini”, and: j’agree. But while this is a parched, non-sticky vanilla, Eau Duelle is a cozy scent, too. It’s nose-ticklingly peppery at the start, with cypriol offering up smoky and woody facets, like a centuries-old library kept warm with a stone fireplace. Ideal for one-on-one study dates and wool sweaters that get pulled off in a hurry, Eau Duelle is comforting, soft, and appealingly brainy.
P.S. I wore Eau Duelle all the time when I first got it, and my lesbian ex-therapist (“ex” only because we moved) once said, “This is probably not something I should be asking, but would it be too strange if I asked you to write down the name of your perfume? It’s really good.”
If there’s a better perfume compliment than your therapist tiptoeing across her previously unstated personal boundaries to smell you again, I don’t want to know about it!!
New York Intense by Nicolaï
If you were a queer professor who wore, say, tailored tweed blazers with suede elbow patches and crisp little button-down shirts, spritzing on this perfume to top it all off would not be exactly… fair. In fact, it would be wrong.
Almost evil.
That’s because nothing—NOTHING—smells as crisp and clean and smart and studious as Nicolaï’s New York Intense.
I mean, FUCKIN’ A. This is academic cosplay. This is Great Hall horny. If you’d like to advertise how hot and intelligent you are, how smoothly in control and freshly showered and also probably rich you are, this is the one.
New York Intense is here to collect tears of hopeless longing from everyone you meet. Just try to resist its singing bergamot-and-lemon opening; its immaculate, untouchable pepper, clove, cinnamon, and lavender heart. Almost barbershoppy in nature at first sniff, New York Intense saunters into its final movement—an ambery patchouli drydown of sweet resins, green vetiver, and dark-natured oakmoss—without ever losing its train of thought, without once stumbling over a word. Radiant and long-lasting, designed as a masculine but upsettingly excellent on anyone, this is a projection of the kind of polish and ease that can’t be taught.
Original by Comme des Garçons
Everything is new. It’s a cloudless autumn day at the start of your academic year, and your flannel is so fresh from the store it’s still fluffy. You shuffle your feet through just-fallen yellow leaves on the still-green grass as you carry your books across the quad. Music drifts out of open dorm windows, and the sun is warm on your back, and the whole day is free after class.
On a day like this, only Comme des Garçons Original will do. Extraordinarily bright, warm and calm, this is a huge, complicated, dry, spice-filled embrace of a perfume without even a hint of sweetness. With what feels like no top, middle, or base notes—this one is everything everywhere all at once—CdG Original somehow viscerally conjures autumn leaves on a fresh and sparkling afternoon, even though I have no freaking idea how it does that.
What’s in this? Everything. Cinnamon. Cloves. Cardamom. Nutmeg. Black pepper, rose, sandalwood, honey, hay, labdanum, coriander… it’s actually easier to list what’s not in it. (What’s not in this is sugar or fruit or anything overtly green-feeling.)
CdG Original smells different on everyone—different people’s skins pick out different facets of this perfume in a way that makes it feel endlessly new. This one’s been around since 1994, but it somehow feels both ancient and like it could have come out yesterday.
Here it is. It’s for you—the scent of a shining warm world that’s waited thousands of years for you to explore it.
That’s it for this round of Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations! I’ll be back next time to answer more questions.
In the meantime…
Do YOU have a perfume question?
Incredible recommendations as always but I cannot BELIEVE you shared all of those questions without once mentioning Virgo season! This is the most Virgo season queer perfume post of all time! In the best possible way!
Please stop making me want to buy all the perfume (don't stop, I love it)