Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations: Pride Edition (Round 2)
picking these took years off my life
Hello my beautifully scented succubi!! As promised, I’m back for Round 2 of Incredibly Specific Queer Perfume Recommendations: Pride Edition and BOY did I have a hard time choosing which perfumes to highlight for our collective High Holy Month!
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 WILL be huffing your neck on a Pride dance floor this year!!
I am not kidding, I stood in front of my perfume cabinet for an hour, hemming and hawing and clinking bottles together and laying contenders out on the bed, thinking unstable thoughts, like “it would be fun to do a top 18 Pride perfume countdown, like one every day for the rest of the month” and “i can’t narrow it down more than this, i’m sure people would like to read about the 13 perfumes for every mood of Pride.”
In the end, I wept. I suffered.
I chose three.
And here they are:
Universal Supreme by Blackbird
This little bottle was sitting on the “expensive nonsense for you to buy” shelf at my incredible hairstylist’s salon (hi Abbey!!), and while I was waiting for my appointment, I idly picked it up and sniffed.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was NOT THIS. Universal Supreme knocked me over, it was so bizarre and so… nostalgic? I dunno, it smelled like something I used to know but had forgotten. I smelled a strong cherry note, I knew that, but also there was something fizzy about it, something startling and hot-white, like a beam of bright sunlight on your face waking you up in the morning.
I sniffed it again, frowning. What was this stuff?? It made me want to buy a three-pack of white Hanes tank tops and wear them out braless, with a LOT of lipgloss. It made me remember a thin red dress with flowers on it from Forever 21 that I’d worn until it finally fell apart in my hands. I bought Universal Supreme on the spot, got into my oven-hot car after the appointment, sprayed the perfume onto my wrists and neck, and drove home with the windows down, radio cranked up loud.
Later, I looked this shit up, and just look at the description of Universal Supreme on the Blackbird website:
Universal Supreme is the absolute freedom of summer. Inescapable heat, cherry ice pops, absolutely nothing to do (yet so much to do), laying in warm grass watching the stars, hot asphalt, riding bikes, scraped up knees and elbows, screaming without a care in the world and having no idea what time it is.
SCENT NOTES: cherry, frankincense, cedar, heliotrope, rose, iris, dry grass, oud, sandalwood, swimming pool, strawberry
Well, fuck me if it isn’t all there! Everything in that description? is in this bottle, from the cherry ice pops to the hot concrete to the weird, discernible chlorine/swimming pool note. Universal Supreme is summer, all of it, from when you were a kid, and it smells great in hot weather, and it wants to go to Pride with you, now that you’re over 21 and can buy everyone wine coolers.
Patchouli Intense by Parfums de Nicolaï (aka Nicolaï)
Happy Pride!!! HERE IS A BATSHIT PATCHOULI PERFUME, patchouli dialed up to an 11, patchouli so intense that it has ascended its own consciousness and no longer even smells like patchouli as you know it, instead smelling ICE COLD and very mean and stylish. It lures you in with a sweet, cinnamony orange note and then plunges you into a chilled, dark night of patchouli and thorny rose, with an almost nasty drydown of leather and soft amber.
Gay. It’s so gay.
Nuclear in strength, one spray of Patchouli Intense will be enough for your friends to find you in a crowd outside, as if you were trailing shining green ribbons of scent behind you. It’s instantly recognizable and also impossible to forget – people will turn to you and sniff, their eyes like moons. I’ve tested Patchouli Intense on lots and lots of queers, and this one’s a winner.
This is a perfume to ruin lives with.
Go gently into that good night, darling.
Putain des Palaces by Etat Libre d'Orange
I originally bought this for the name. I had never smelled it – this was one of my very first blind buys, back when I was just falling down the perfume rabbit hole. Putain des Palaces means “whore of the palaces” or “hotel whore,” and excuse me??? Don’t tempt me with a good time!
When I got Putain des Palaces in the mail and sniffed it, my immediate feeling was regret. I had gambled in the blind-buy casino, and I had lost. I hated this perfume. Sprayed from the bottle into the air, awful. Cloying powder, almondy sweetness, something almost milky? and floral. GROSS.
But it was called Hotel Whore!! I wanted to like it; I wanted to like it real bad, and so I sprayed it on myself, and guess what? This perfume does something magic on your skin. Putain des Palaces is a makeup-and-leather-scented bomb, and on skin, this perfume smells like an expensive hotel room where something has… happened. The violet-rosy-sweet scent of vintage lipsticks; the sliding warmth of two people touching their skin together for the first time. This is a glossy black leather stiletto on someone’s neck, a belt being undone with teeth. Underneath it all, an undercurrent of something wrong, just a tiny hint – you look up at the ceiling from the bed and see what could only be a bloodstain.
Putain des Palaces, according to the website, has notes of rose absolute, violet, leather, lily of the valley, tangerine, ginger, rice powder, amber, and a small amount of some kind of filthy, animalic, bloody-mess note.
I still hate this perfume, and I hate it so much I went through an entire bottle and bought a second. You just can’t stop sniffing it. I love it.
Putain des Palaces is the scent of going with a stranger to the next location and not asking any questions. It’s the dark, labyrinthine rooms behind rooms at the bathhouse; it’s the taste of fog machines; it’s leather collars being pulled through a crowded room.
This perfume is difficult to love, and that’s good: It’s not here for love.
But you might not be able to help yourself.
Alright, have a fun Pride, my loves!! Drink water and tell your friends where you are and stay safe!!
And smell so good, obvs!!!
💌If you’d like to sniff any of these three Pride 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! 💌
***UPDATE*** The winners are: Shabby Tigers, Gray, and Yrica B! Congrats to you three, and I’ll send you a PM on here to get a good mailing address!!
Oh yeah and I’d sniff any of them but that patchouli is calling my name
I love everything about how you write about fragrance and I will keep eating it up THANK YOU