Women's Perfume Trends Predicted Fascism (No Really)
I want to smell like a woman who might tell you to fuck off one moment, and then enthuse to you you're the most fascinating person she's ever met the next– and I don't want the person on the other end of the equation to know which they're going to get until after the moment has already happened. You know. Normal lady stuff. Do you know how hard that is in the year of our lord Beyoncé, in 2025? Everything you can buy at a decent price point is designed for women to smell flat, sweet, and like something they should be consumed. I'm not 5. I don't want to smell like a cupcake. I want to smell like regret, dammit!
Well, let me walk back the previous comment--yes, obviously I want to smell like regret, people should know what they're getting into before they speak to me shouldn't they? Back in the day, perfumes designed for little girls didn't smell like they might give you second hand type 2 diabetes – they actually smelled interesting. They were essentially training wheels before you graduated to the big leagues. The point of which was to let you feel like an adult without taking any meaningful steps towards being one before you were ready to, and also, to teach you that a little goes a long way when it comes to perfume, unless you want to give everyone a headache...and let's face it, sometimes you did when bedtime hit and you wanted to stay up and watch Cheers.
Remember Tinkerbell cosmetics? It was a line of makeup for young girls, the star of the collection was a knock off version of Chanel No. 5, the smell of which I am still pretty sure is burned into my nose (and childhood bedroom carpet, sorry mom!) to this day. That stuff was potent. It was straightforward, and if you didn't think too deeply about it, it could be mistaken for the magical exlixirs that were in an older woman's rotation that you admired. It didn't smell like sugared raspberries and honeyed lemonade, it smelled like adulthood– because back then, the adults were wearing a variety of scents, many of which could not be found in nature, let alone a bakery, only the local mall food court.
I remember the in-your-face aldehydes of the '80s--the synthetic notes that make you think of permed big hair, plum lipstick, and Liz Taylor on TV. There was also the so-sweet it rotted decay of Dior's Poison (a personal favorite to this day, remember: danger. )
Those absolute icons then gave way to the aquatics of the '90s like Issey Miyake's L'Eau D'Issey and Calvin Klein's CKOne. (Coincidentally this is also about the time I graduated from Tinkerbell to the poorly named, but amazing dupe for L'Eau D'Issey, Dana's Fetish. I will be taking no questions at this time. You either love it because you were of that era and spritzed it too, or want to travel back in time and put everyone who came up with the concept behind this particular brand name on a watch list. Honestly, both are valid stances.)
Then came Y2K and the celebrity perfume explosion. If Sarah Jessica Parker's perfume line has no more fans, it's because that gag order has finally gone into effect because I begged whoever owns the formula to Lovely to never discontinue it. It's a musky, funky, delicate, and dare I say feminine scent? Of course, the 2000s is also the beginning of the reign of terror of the gourmand, and let me be clear here: I do not hate all gourmands. In fact, I am quite fond of another celebrity line that is almost exclusively gourmand: Britney Spears' Fantasy, and its flankers. They're fun. They smell like how it felt to go out in your best synthetic blend top, in shoes that were guaranteed to give you blisters, chugging down cosmopolitans because Sex and the City still felt in 2007, especially if you didn't live in New York. They're neon loud, unapologetic, and would hold your hair while you puke-cried because you saw your ex talking to a girl – those girls are friends.
For all of these eras, there was variety (and I didn't even go back through the 70s and earlier, where there were even funkier options.) But now? why does it feel like you walk into Ulta/Sephora/Nordstorm etc. and all you see are overly sweet gourmands? Since when has a juicy peach fucked up your life and left you wanting more?!
Look. I have tried to come over to the dark side. Embrace the trends. But there is a voice in the back of my head that tells me that giving in to smelling like a consumable, sweet, non-offensive praline is submission. These scents are flat, interchangeable, and yet somehow, if you read about perfumes, they are the ones that get described as feminine, girlie, and pleasing. Excuse me?
Personally, I think the earth, sex, and gothic abandoned church vibes with the lingering whiff of peril from Tom Ford's Black Orchid are plenty feminine, thank you. They're just not the kind of feminine that necessarily wants to submit to anyone, let alone a man they met on a free dating app. I mean, burn-the-Roman-army-down-to-the-ground-and-then-spit-on-the-ashes Boudica was a queen, after all. That's a feminine job, isn't it?! So why aren't the perfumes that invoke blood, sex, and vanquishing enemies getting described as feminine, or hell, even getting mass produced right now?!
If you look at the trend of sweet, inoffensive perfumes, their rise is eerily tied to increasing fascism, at least in America. The complete sugar bomb of Baccarat Rouge 540? Widely released in 2017 (although you wouldn't guess it, based on how much I smell it to this day.) Anecdotally, it feels that Baccarat rose while Le Labo's Santal 33 fell– a far more polarizing and complicated unisex scent that to many smells like pickles and pencil shavings (obviously I love it, and wore it to death. RIP to a real one.) Clearly the Trump of it all is that the odious (and not in a fun, kicky, experimental Tom Ford capsule collection way) is the backbone to my thesis– as that dipshit rose, women's vibrant role in American society was systematically stripped away, with some weird psyop help from social media weirdos who pushed the tradwife lifestyle as if our grandmothers were not given cast iron skillets when they got married, to defend themselves. The result of which was a flattened, myopic, and very sterile view of womanhood, femininity, and as a result, the products that represent that.
I believe that fragrance trends are cultural shortcuts. They tell us what is going on with society, and this sickly sweet trend smells like rot--and not the good kind. Complicated is out, flat and consumable is in. Who wants to flatten themselves for anyone, let alone a 4-but-since-the-bar-is-in-hell-he-gets-treated-like-an-8 who thinks watching their kid is babysitting? Not me! On the fascist watchlist I go, I guess. At least I'll smell good.
Do I have an answer here? No. Other than to say, I will keep layering my slutty Jovan Wild Musk with my Black Orchid, and treasuring my original formulation Poison (which I also layer with Wild Musk, it adds grit, and a little bit of "WTF was that?" to almost anything) and embrace my attempts at trying to smell a little slutty and a little vintage--you know, what I consider feminine. That's the best weapon here. Rejecting the notion that women can only be one thing. That we have to smell nice, but in the narrow, Christian conservative definition of it.
If you want to smell like pistachios layered in marzipan, do you. Just don't try to corner the market on what femininity is because to me, it smells like the blood of my enemies, and the ashes of their fortifications. You know. Girl stuff.
(Image Credit:Lifetime and Canva)
