Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations: Scent for a Top and Scent for a Whole New Life
we all contain multitudes
Hello my fragrant friends of Dorothy! 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 looking to advertise your topping skills.
You know what? Fuck cozy.
That’s right; I said it. Fuck cozy! It was a long-ass winter, wasn’t it, and you’ve had it with sweatpants and snuggling and canceled plans. You’ve had it with icy rain, with crockpots, with closed-toe shoes, with vitamin D supplements every goddamn day.
Netflix? Never heard of her. Soup season? Bye bitch.
It’s summer now, and you’re in the mood to be in a tank top on somebody’s deck, your armpit, head, and/or leg hair softly rustling in the breeze while a lawn mower buzzes far off in the distance. Right? RIGHT?
You want cutoffs. Warm skin. Unplanned, casual hangs with queers from the neighborhood just wandering by and sitting on the stoop. You want cold fizzing drinks. Maybe with a little umbrella. You want cuties. New cuties; cuties you’ve never seen before and didn’t know existed. You want laughter—we’re talking heads-thrown-back, way-too-loud, causing-a-ruckus hilarity as you and your friends wait for dinner on an outdoor patio somewhere.
And you know what else? You want to hear the queer tea first, firsthand, from the open mouths and wide eyes of the players involved in the drama. Is it too much to ask? IS IT???? I believe it is not!!!
But you know what would be more fun than getting all the good gossip?
….Being at the center of the gossip.
Yes. I feel you. You’re restless. Full of energy. Ready to start something.
And right now, you’re an untapped resource—the living, breathing answer to your fair city’s rumored “top shortage.”
And nobody knows it.
Maybe you’re with a new group of people. Maybe your exes have all moved away. Maybe people don’t ever, ever think you’re a top because of idiotic dated ideas about what a top looks or acts like.
Whatever the reason, it sounds like you need to do a little marketing.
You need Gucci Guilty Absolute Pour Homme.
I do not offer you this perfume lightly. Use it with care, use it with caution, use it with full knowledge of its potential to leave wreckage (sexual/emotional) in its path.
Gucci Guilty Absolute Pour Homme smells like gas. Like dusty hot tires. Like streaking down a deserted Nevada highway on a motorcycle, covered head-to-toe in leather. It’s diesel fumes; it’s blistering patchouli, it’s old leather boots and sunburned skin, it’s dry and hot and HORNY, and it’s here to do some damage in your personal life.
A great perfume with a stupid name—one you have to be incredibly careful to copy exactly when searching for it online, since there are approximately 4,158 flankers (versions) of Gucci Guilty out there and NONE of them come anywhere close to “Gucci Guilty Absolute Pour Homme”—this fragrance is relatively inexpensive (you can get 50 ML for less than 60 bucks) and looks like aged whiskey bottled in a glass flask, which renders it a camp, over-the-top “11” on the Butch O’Meter. It’s such a queer crowd-pleaser that when I wear it out to gay shit, I usually carry a tiny sample bottle of it with me on my person, because someone will confront me and demand to know what it is, and I will never get over the delight of promptly handing over a tiny labeled spray bottle of the perfume a wild-eyed queer is asking me about.
Dangerous and overtly promising on a masc-leaning person; provokingly sexual on someone who leans more femme, if you wear Gucci Guilty Absolute Pour Homme—if you wear this dry, hot, diesely leather perfume combined with a leather jacket, I wash my hands of whatever happens next.
You should also probably wash your hands before whatever happens next.
Reader Question: “I am newly divorced and in a new love and I need a new signature scent that exudes and exalts my new life/style -- confident, don't-fuck-with-me, very hot, very sexy, very glances that make the room blush. A woman who knows herself. Previously, this vibe for me was 10 Corso Como, the animalic French-Girl-in-August HEAT of it -- but I am needing to leave old scent memories behind. I have not gotten a full bottle of anything in a few years, and so I want some advice on what samples I should splash out for with Luckyscent.
-ANON
ANON! Sounds like you’ve been making huge moves in your life! I’m so happy that you’re finding new joys, and I’m even happier you want to try some new scents to match how you’re feeling! Also: 10 Corso Como?? I can see I’m not dealing with an amateur, here!
OK. OK. I’m trying to calm down, but my mind is racing with possibilities for you. In the full version of your question, ANON, you mentioned you don’t like aldehydes (in case we haven’t talked about it, y’all, aldehydes are a vast category of perfume ingredients usually used to give a perfume formula some lift—think soap bubble-feeling or a kind of champagne sparkle; aldehydes can also smell floral, metallic, powdery, or clean, though, so this is a hard one to avoid entirely). You also said white florals make you barf, and that you hate a classic cologne/grapefruit and lime-style thing.
Thrilling! This is all thrilling because it is so specific!!
So for your new life, ANON, requiring a smell that projects a hugely sexy "don’t fuck with me” aura, what about trying…
Female Christ by 19-69
You think anyone at the helm of this gayass newsletter is above trying a perfume because of its name?
THINK AGAIN. The second I heard about Female Christ, I wanted to smell it, based, at first, solely on the incredible name, and then on the fact that it was rumored to be a powerhouse patchouli. And then it was backordered forever, and then when I finally got my hands on a sample, I opened the box containing my order, and stopped dead. The strangest, most haunting smell was filling the room. It smelled sexy. It smelled dirty, both in a “dirt and rain” way and also in a “racy” way. It smelled… uh oh, it smelled like a fully developed, highly suggestive patchouli-based perfume.
“Nonono,” I whimpered, hauling out the sample pack I’d ordered. Inside were seven samples, all perfect and intact in their tiny glass prisons, and one smashed sample.
Female Christ. The sample I’d wanted above all others.
Well, fuck. I could tell from the drydown inside the box that Female Christ was exactly my shit—a huge, full-throated, dark and sexy patchouli, the kind that turns heads, the kind that gets you followed into bathrooms and held a second too long by people hugging you hello. Female Christ smelled so good—so weirdly addictive and complicated and filthy-good—that I left the open cardboard box on my dresser for a week, just letting the scent of Female Christ fill the room. (Which it did. For a full week. The longevity on this one is wild.)
But why am I telling you all this, ANON?
Well! I’m telling you this because Female Christ might be just the unexpected thing you’re looking for. This is a spicy, rich, rounded patchouli BOMB of a fragrance, and it has THAT NAME, and YES I ordered another sample, and YES I used it all up, and WOO did it go to the top of my wishlist for a full bottle. There is weird stuff going on in this formula!! Stuff I would never think of working in a perfume! Like eucalyptus, like thyme, like an odd pimento note!! There’s also rhubarb in here! And the drydown is strange and sweet and resinous—a hot balsamic benzoin mixes with ambergris, cinnamon, and a bit of vanilla (for approachability), and the result is like a choir of holy angels singing backup as Female Christ rises from the dead, swathed in a cloud of velvety patchouli like a sexy 60s rock star reinventing herself for her next act!!!
A warning, ANON: I know you wouldn’t, but don’t buy a bottle of this without ordering a sample first. Female Christ is a “love it or hate it” situation, and it needs a little time, each wearing, to warm up before becoming a sexy, hazy aura that pulses around you.
Wazamba by Parfum d'Empire
No preamble here, ANON. Just:
Holy fucking shit is this stuff good.
There’s something about Wazamba that smells pure. Like you have strong wings, and you’ve always had them, and now you’re rising up and taking off into a clear sky, fires burning beneath you. A serious woody-incense perfume, Wazamba opens with Somalian incense, warmed by opoponax and myrrh, and surrounds you with luxurious wood notes—sandalwood and cypress, the sharp-pine-needle scent of fir. I love this perfume.
So does almost everyone who gets a whiff of it. Although there are plenty of resins in Wazamba, and there’s said to be a dried apple-note in here (I don’t smell it), the result is not ambery or sweet; instead, this is a magnificent wood scent, enormous but reserved, with a trail that lingers and hours of longevity.
I can’t begin to tell you how many samples of this stuff I’ve given away, ANON. Maybe half my bottle?? People freak out over it. And that makes sense, because Wazamba smells like instant tranquility—it’s the rock-solid calm of someone who knows exactly who they are.
Wild Card Rec: Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed by A Lab on Fire (WWDIS)
What if we went in an entirely different direction, ANON? What if we went less sexy!!! and became the human equivalent of snuggling? What if we removed every edge and instead went for sweetness, for softness, for gentle-by-design?
I think we’d land right about here. ANON, Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed is not only a wonderfully fluffy and fun fragrance composed by Dominique Ropion, one of my favorite perfumers of all time, but it also smells playfully sweet and uncomplicated, and has such a dumb name.
Or does it?
Is it possible that the name on this perfume is actually brainy? That everything about Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed is calculated and smart, an on-purpose bimbo of a scent that knows that the hardest thing to be is vulnerable?
Maybe! Or maybe this is just a really lovely, pitch-perfect vanilla musk—cozy, soft, satisfying, and not-too-sweet. In fact, MSJROB has a thread of salt running through it, tempering the toffee and amber and vanilla. There’s also a cleanness to it; the musk has been laundered until it’s cottony and smooth, like white flannel sheets washed dozens of times. MSJROB is made to be curled up with, ANON, and that silly name?
…think of it as a reminder that it’s OK to be messy and sexy and soft. We all contain multitudes—especially you, right now.
That’s it for this week’s Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations! I’ll be back next week to answer more questions.
In the meantime…
Do YOU have a perfume question?
goddamnit Krista, that’s two I need to try like I need oxygen plus one more I’d be at about that level over if I hadn’t just finished reading about the first two. your hit rate on my core is ridiculous
I love these write-ups! Female Christ sounds up my alley, when I searched online the first thing that came up was Le Labo Patchouli 24, which also sounds good. I like upscale patchouli.
When you’re getting something new, do you order all your samples from the perfume company’s website? I’ve just got a Sephora close by, but I don’t think they stock high end or experimental scents.