Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations: Scent for a Cozy Trap and Scent for Butch Comfort
thank god we're finally not hot!!
Hellooooo my fragrant and fancy little nancies! (And a special welcome to everyone who found me via Maddy Court’s excellent and enormously homosexual newsletter, TV Dinner💋) 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 It’s About to Be Cuffing Season, and It’s Time to Set Your Trap
You wake up at midnight, chilled. The blankets are scrunched down by the foot of the bed. You left your windows open, and a cool wind has picked up in the night. Pulling the blankets back up and snuggling down, you listen to the trees rustling in the darkness. As the first drops of rain began to patter, you fall back asleep.
In the morning, the sky outside your window is electric blue. Yellow leaves dot the still-wet sidewalk. Padding into the kitchen, you hear it for the first time this year: Geese, honking away in the distance, streaming off to the south in a noisy V. Holding your mug, you look for them and catch a glimpse of the formation, black against the sky. One lone goose is flapping frantically behind them to catch up.
“Good luck, babe!” you murmur, and go to dig out some wool socks from your drawer.
It’s here, homos. It’s happened.
Sweata weatha. Cuffing season.
We have had our brat summer and we are ready – more than ready! – for Animals-In-a-Children’s-Book Fall.
Fuuuuuuck we needed this. We want corduroy; we want layers. We want to hold shockingly expensive paper bags of pick-your-own-orchard-apples, and we want to do that now. We want to wear closed-toe shoes, for god’s sake! Please! We want to pop our silly little knit gay beanies on our heads and to have unrequited crushes on aloof queer professors who wear blazers with suede patches on the elbows!!! Is it asking too much??? IT IS NOT!! WE DESERVE IT!!!
And if you’re looking for someone to do all this with – to curl up under a quilt with while the Crockpot is bubbling and the Game of Thrones theme song is playing – well, it’s high time we went about setting you a snug little trap, don’t you think?
Five o’clock au gingembre by Serge Lutens is the cozy, cozy bait you need.
Good fucking god. I am picturing you sauntering toward me in a worn flannel shirt with the sun behind you – your neck smelling like this – and I honestly don’t think we’re gonna have any trouble here. What do you want from me??? You can have it!!!
Five o’clock au gingembre is a warm, spicy-black-tea scent, a mouthful of candied ginger, the almost prickly heat of someone warming up your hands by holding them in theirs. It’s cinnamon. Ginger. Pepper. Spices tickling your nose over a honeyed black bergamot tea blend, all softened and made lovely by a friendly amber and woodsy base.
This perfume is not sweet. It’s not loud, either – it wears close to the skin – and it doesn’t smell like anything else I’ve smelled. What it is is magical. Magical in that I know of no other scent that so perfectly conjures the feeling of burying your face in someone’s cable-knit sweater on a fall day. Five o’clock au gingembre is the perfume equivalent of an autumnal golden hour, and you should use it with caution, unless you’re trying to marry the person you’ve lured into your cozy den.
Reader Question: “I need a butch cologne that makes me smell comforting and like home.”
-T4T GirlHusband
I love this brief, T4T GirlHusband!! I feel like so many butch-feeling scents are trying to be like EAU DE SEXMAN by ROCKHARD or ACQUA BLUE SPORTSBALL by NOTGAY(ATALL)™, but honestly? a butch perfume that smells comforting and like home is all any of us were ever asking for.
Here are my recommendations for smelling so comfortable and butch that everyone melts in your presence:
Eau des Baux by L’Occitane
Several years ago, my friend Jen and I were at a party at our friends’ parents’ house. Giggling and a little tipsy, we went into the basement, where we knew there was another bathroom that would be free. While Jen was peeing, I opened all the drawers in the cabinet under the sink, looking for ibuprofen. I didn’t find any, but I did find a half-full, brown glass bottle of something called Eau des Baux, and, well…. the temptation was stronger than me. I took the top of the bottle off and sniffed it.
Huh. Nice.
Tentatively interested, I sprayed Eau des Baux in the air.
“That smells great,” Jen said.
“Yeah,” I said. I sprayed some on my wrists. Mmmm. That peppery, spicy vanilla. Those pine notes. God. I sprayed some more, this time in my hair.
“Do me!” Jen offered her wrists.
Reader, we drowned ourselves in Eau des Baux. We choked out the bathroom. We couldn’t stop; we were like cats experiencing catnip for the first time. Eau des Baux!!! I’m sure anyone walking by would have seen visible waves of scent in the air. Still giggling, still tipsy, we headed back upstairs, where we ran smack into… Tom.
The owner of the house. Our host. Our friends’ Dad.
He sniffed the air, frowning. “Something smells like…”
“Oh my god,” Jen said, busting up laughing. “Tom! We smell like you!!”
“We used your cologne,” I said, red-faced. “In the basement bathroom.”
Tom stood startled in the kitchen. Then his face cracked into a goofy smile. “I thought I recognized it!” he cried. “You guys smell great!!”
“No, you smell great!”
“Hang on, I’m gonna put some on, too!” he said, heading for the basement. He came back up in a few seconds, beaming and positively radiating Eau des Baux. Later, he tried to push the bottle into my hands as I left. (I didn’t take it, but I did buy my own bottle on eBay the next morning.)
I am telling you all this, T4T GirlHusband, for two reasons:
To warn you that even your dad isn’t safe from me when it comes to perfume; and
Because Tom is the nicest grown man I know. Hands down. It makes a huge amount of sense that his cologne is Eau des Baux, because this scent is the nicest butch comfort smell I know. It smells like coming home. It smells like spicy cookies baking in the oven of a cabin built out of cypress logs, a thin trickle of incense-smoke lazily curling up to the ceiling. It smells kind, and warm, and strong, and if you want to smell like butch comfort, this one is made for you, bb.
Crypt
First of all, the name! Crypt??! Get out of here, let me smell this!! Crypt comes to us from a tiny boutique in Victoria, B.C. that mostly does extravagant bespoke floral arrangements, but the owner is also a gifted perfumer who tucks her line of perfumes into hidden-feeling nooks around the store and smiles shyly if you tell her they’re good.
I chose Crypt for you, T4T GirlHusband, because it nails your brief – it manages to smell very comforting while also smelling butch and a little bit horny, which: ideal. It opens with a big, discernible rosemary note and the smell of juniper leaves crushed between your fingers, and then moves swiftly into the “woods” category – it’s aromatic cedar, it’s sandalwood, it’s snapping twigs and gathering dry firewood to burn. All of this adds up to smell hot and homey to me, like how a worn denim jacket hanging on a hook would smell – one that was at a bonfire a couple of days ago. Frankincense and a balsamic, smokey myrrh round out the base, and the whole package tied together is unexpectedly sexy, and… listen, all I’m saying is that if you rolled your car into a ditch in the middle of nowhere, Crypt is the scent that you would call to come and get you out.
[PSA: An intrepid reader has alerted me that this perfume house uses a pejorative exonym for the Romani people, so please factor that into your decisions around supporting the brand.]
Wild Card Rec: Stash by SJP
So SJP stands for, um, Sarah Jessica Parker, but don’t run away screaming, T4T GirlHusband!! Carrie Bradshaw is actually great at choosing perfume formulas for her celebrity scent line. And things usually stay firmly on the girly side with her, but Stash is… different.
Stash is designed to be androgynous. It’s addictive, smelling way more expensive than it is, all woody and spiced and private, like a sexy weekend leaf-peeping trip, or like chilled skin warming up beside the fire at a lodge. Opening with black pepper, sage, and citrus notes, Stash’s heart is a big, expansive cedar tree, touched with patchouli and incense and spicy ginger-feelings and a lovely kind of nuttiness. It dries down into a lingering skin-scent of woods and dry musk, and it stays put for hours, smelling comforting and intimate and butch in a way that is frankly startling for a celebrity scent. It even comes in an bottle that is not even a little bit embarrassing!! For under $40? what a steal! Thanks, Carrie Bradshaw!
Stash has been recently discontinued, though, so now is the time to search for this online, before the secondhand sellers get any big ideas. And they will, and soon, because Stash smells great – like strong, capable arms leading you into the house on a crisp autumn afternoon.
That’s it for this week’s Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations! I’ll be back next time to answer more questions.
And if you’d like to sniff any of these perfumes (and you live in the U.S.), tell me in the comments which one, and I’ll pick THREE winners at random to send a lil’ gay sample to!💌
In the meantime…
Do YOU have a perfume question?
Ask me here on this form that is linked right here!
Byeeee!
***UPDATE*** The winners are: Anne H, Wendy L W, and Katie! Congrats to you three, and I’ll send you a PM on here to get a good mailing address!!
In my whole life I have only bought perfume once until now, Coco Mademoiselle that was, in retrospect, 90% about fancying Keira Knightley and 10% about wanting to feel like an adult. But you absolutely sold me on Five O'clock Au Gingembre, I bought a sample, and I'm not sure my baby queer life will ever be the same again!
I picked up a sample of Five o’clock au gingembre and finally wore it around my girlfriend last night and let's just say that this scent is a SUCCESS.