Has There Ever Been a More Appropriate Time to Reach for a Gender-Bending Fragrance?

 

On Sunday night, Jeffrey Tambor may take home the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for his turn as Transparent’s Mort/Maura Pfefferman, a 60-something man in the process of transitioning into a woman. Played with nuance and humor by Tambor, the career-making role has been critically acclaimed as a major breakthrough in television. And its timing has proven uncanny: Over the past six months, America has watched Caitlyn Jenner’s own courageous transitioning process unfold in real life in front of the camera.

This week, at the New York collections, the concept of gender fluidity seemed to have carried over creatively into the minds of designers, with men walking down the runway in heels at Hood By Air and an army’s worth of female models emboldening the “boyishness” of buzz cuts at Givenchy and Alexander Wang. In fact, the binaries of gender seemed to be the last concern on anyone’s mind. Which got us thinking: As our notions of beauty expand, so does our idea of how we conceive something as simple as a haircut, a stroke of makeup—or even a defining signature scent. After all, with the boundaries between what is conventionally feminine and masculine blurring by the minute, has there ever been a more appropriate time to embrace a fragrance that’s liberated from such gender constraints?

According to French perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, scent is the simplest way to experiment with your place on the scale of the sexes. Less polarizing than a lipstick or body hair, “It’s invisible. You can’t see it—you’re not holding a bottle in your hand.” So the question becomes not whether you smell like a man or a woman, but, in Kurkdjian’s words, “does it smell good or bad?” By borrowing a boyfriend or brother’s cologne, you wouldn’t exactly be the first to dip into the other side’s olfactory preferences. Notes of amber, musk, and herbal flowers, says Kurkdjian, have been universally enjoyed since the 17th century.

As if on cue, this fall there are more unisex bottles on shelves than ever—the most recent of which have been blended by newcomer Ex Nihilo, a Parisian collection of eau de parfums designed to evoke such universal pleasures as a cashmere scarf or a dewy morning in the South of France. “It’s the idea of shared freshness,” explained Kurkdjian, who executed one of his favorites—his own Aqua Universalis—to capture a crisp and clean blend of citrus, lily of the valley, and bergamot that would last. And Le Labo’s city exclusives, including Gaiac 10 and Cuir 28 (available globally this month only), are meant to represent a place of origin, not your chromosomes. Here, a look at seven scents that are as much his as they are hers.

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