Monday, June 25, 2018

Perfumes and you, a primer

 Hello, and thanks for tuning in.

I've started working on a schedule for posting that I hope to keep.  This should keep my video and blog content coming to you more regularly now.

Now onto the article.

It’s 2018, and you might be wondering:
Is it alright for men to smell like rosemary and heather growing amongst dry wood in the sunny, Garrigues region of France?
Yes, it is.
What about a blend of freshly cut iris, pink peppercorn, and a stone heating in the sun?
Totally fine.
OK, how about a bright orange blossom that just weathered a hard rain and cedar felled from the shores of Corsica?
In fact, yes — but why not add a touch of bergamot?
If recent growth in the men’s fragrance industry is any indication, it is increasingly the norm for men to smell pleasant.

 I agree, it's fine for men to smell how they like, but the point is, people don't smell like those things.  They're all things that are, in fact, not men.  Personally, perfumes tend to be too strong for me, and I really don't care for them, and that's why I wear unscented deodorant and buy soaps with little to no scent if possible. 

Still, if our natural scent were sub-par, then we wouldn't have stayed alive as a species this long.  We smell funky because it works for natural selection.  I agree that it's not a particularly pleasant smell generally, but it works, and that's kinda the point.
Expected to reach $18.7 billion by 2020, this industry is climbing from $14.8 billion in 2015, according to a study by London-based industry researcher Euromonitor. This reflects the broader rise of the men’s grooming industry, which includes shaving products, fragrances, and toiletries. Men are now more invested in personal upkeep than ever, which is good news for all, but especially for the fragrance business. 

That's a lot of money.  I like how the implication is that men smelling better benefits everyone, because we all know that men's stench kills thousands every single day. We have to feed the narrative that people smell bad and things smell good so that we can make that number even higher, obviously.

Again, I don't really care for perfumes because they typically annoy my lungs and sinuses, but I can appreciate why some people enjoy them.  I just don't think it's nearly such a dramatic problem.  Know what's even better news for all?  Ending world hunger.
The week before Christmas each year sees a dramatic spike in Google searches for “men’s cologne,” but it’s quickly becoming a year-round fascination year-over-year.
News, folks.  This is it.  People searching for gifts around the holiday is now news.

The growth of the men’s fragrance industry is partially indicative of changing gender norms, where men are granted more aesthetic freedom and fluidity. 
I bet you didn't see that coming, did you?  Generally speaking, men and women want to mate with one another, and generally speaking people will be attracted or repulsed by whichever smells they like or don't like, respectively.  You can change gender norms all you like, but at the end of the day, men are typically going to be attracted to sweeter smells, and women are generally going to be attracted to muskier smells.  There's a reason that the males of the species are the ones that secrete musk, after all.  Pheromones are complicated.

“Men are more comfortable expressing themselves these days,” fragrance historian and master perfumer Roja Dove tells Inverse. “The way we smell is an extension of our sense of style, so as men have become more self-aware of how they present themselves, fragrance is another thing that has become more commonplace as a result.”
 
There was a time when we humans used perfumes almost all the time, especially in high-society, because we didn't have things like showers and soap to wash the excessive dirty smells off.  Generally, though, this isn't an issue today, and a bit of deodorant solves it.  Naturally, scent has been a part of fashion since it was first derived thousands of years ago.

The main difference today is that, for the past several decades, we've had artificial perfumes and smells that have made it very affordable for the average person to use them, so naturally they are more common place.  There's a reason everyone jokes about every high school boy wearing Axe deodorant, after all.  It's because they all wear it.
It’s not only that the men’s fragrance industry is growing, but the range of scents that are considered “masculine” or within the realm of men’s fragrance are also expanding. Men, by today’s standards, need not have a cloud of Axe trailing them at all hours, or feign disinterest in fragrance.
Called it.

The point remains, however, that the scents traditionally considered masculine actually came from male animals, as well as plants that had the same smells or pheromones, or close enough analogues.  You can't exactly go complain to the musk deer that their females should start secreting these scents, after all.

We can decide that it's okay for men to wear whatever scents we want, but that doesn't change which chemicals are going to attract the partner you're looking for more than others. 


“As men have become more comfortable with the concept of scent, it has allowed the male perfume market to evolve into something more diverse. Perfumers are more open to delivering compositions that are more unique, such as a bigger embrace of the use of flowers in masculine compositions,” Dove tells Inverse.
Men are just as comfortable with scents as they've ever been.  Have you ever gone to church, or a retirement home, or even the grocery store when there's older people there?  Men's colognes can be stronger than the women's perfumes.

I mean, sure, there's arguably better marketing today, but the bottle of Old Spice on my shelf came from an older male relative.  Again, I don't often wear the stuff, so it just kinda sits there, but you get the point.


Just a couple decades ago, men were not allowed to stray too far from smelling like the ocean, lest they pose a peril to their masculinity.
Depending on the man, though, and which decade or generation you're talking about, that smell wasn't that common.  Again, old spice and other similar perfumes or colognes smell like something different.  Then again, the average working man probably doesn't care about his scent too much, because he's going to go work in the factory, construction yard, or whatever, and the smell isn't going to last anyway.

Dirt, dust, and all the other stuff in industrial environments easily trumps all the other smells you're gonna put on in the morning.  For a lot of men, it has nothing to do with imperiling their masculinity, it is instead just another that takes time and effort which they could put into something else.  Like making coffee, or going to work, or sleeping, or chopping down trees, or hitting things with hammers.

Men have predominantly worked around other men, and women around other women, for a fair part of history.  It isn't like we need to smell good for our machines, or other men.  We're gonna smell like oil, or burning stuff, or dust, or dirt, or whatever.  It's only more recently we've come to see scent as a thing everyone should have rather than a thing that should be used when you go out for a fun weekend to the bar, movies, or whatever.


Listen to the tone of those words.  Men were oppressed and we are taking their oppression away...

Wait a minute, Inverse is closer to SJW than MRA I thought.  Then again, they're focusing on this issue that they claim is better for everyone, rather than an issue like men's custody or something, which only benefits men, so maybe it is still an SJW issue?  Men's odor is so oppressive that fixing it helps alleviate the oppression of women via scent warfare, I see.  This is fascinating.  That's subtle, like a good perfume.
As Dove discusses in his article, “Why All Men Smell The Same, According to Master Perfumer Roja Dove,” beginning in the ‘90s, men’s fragrance tended to be dominated by an oceanic smell that is “actually calone — an aqueous-smelling material with a pronounced watermelon aspect. It’s a man-made, synthetic molecule that gives the olfactory impression of the fresh seashore through its marine/ozone nuances.”
 Spray the watermelon waters of the deep blue on your face!

“As men have become more comfortable with the concept of scent, it has allowed the male perfume market to evolve into something more diverse. Perfumers are more open to delivering compositions that are more unique, such as a bigger embrace of the use of flowers in masculine compositions,” Dove tells Inverse.
I personally kinda like lavender and jasmine, but I don't really wear them.  This sounds like some marketer looking for a new niche to fill. 

"Oh, that old stuff you're wearing is so out of date and overdone.  Come here, we've got your solution, so you're not like the regular plebs.  Come be our pleb, give us your money."

I'm not really against commercialism, I just think it should be more transparent and honest.

While decoupling fragrance and gender may seem like a modern idea, art historian Jessica Murphy points out that it is really an old idea.

For the majority of it history, fragrance has known no gender. She sees the industrial revolution and resulting commercialization of fragrance as the period when it came to be partitioned into two genders. Before this time, fragrance was lawless — the scent of a rose or a strong musk was open to all.
I mean, that's fair.  Scents were basically just whatever you wanted to wear. Then we created two market segments and now they're trying to create a third with this gender-less stuff.  The best way to make a new market is to complain about the old one and try to replace it with your own, after all.

Even cologne, as it was originally conceived, was intended for and worn by all genders. As the story goes, in 1708, when Giovanni Maria Farina concocted the refreshing, quickly evaporating scent, he wrote to his brother: “I have found a fragrance that reminds me of an Italian spring morning, of mountain daffodils and orange blossoms after the rain.” He named the fragrance Eau de Cologne, after the German city where he was working.
So he found the a smell that he enjoyed.  Excellent!


It was only later that what began as mountain daffodils and orange blossoms lost its more floral origins and came to signify masculinity. Murphy notes that the fragrance was then widely copied and for a long time Eau de Cologne meant a citrus herbal splash with a lighter concentration of oils. For reasons that she does not believe have been well-established, it then evolved to stand in for men’s fragrance.
I mean fair enough, a man was the first one to wear it, and he shared it with his brother, and presumably women liked it so men wore it more often, and more women were attracted by it, and so on.  Something as simple as that can explain the trend.

You know, the reason a lot of guys act macho and a lot of girls act exactly the opposite is because those kinds of people are attracted to one another.  Now, if their peers see that they are using specific fragrances to attract the other, why on earth would they want to use stuff that doesn't seem to be as effective to this end?  Again, scent is tied pretty directly into our brain and wired for our attraction or repulsion.  It's one of the major ways we determine pheromones and stuff, too, even though you can't smell some of them.

Now the western fragrance industry is in many ways returning to an earlier time in history. This shift is largely owed to niche perfumers, outside of the mainstream industry, who have been on the frontline of shaping this move away from strictly gendered fragrances. “[Niche perfumers] were not creating for men or women, but just creating beautiful fragrances,” Sandy Blandin, founder of the fragrance studio Nose Who Knows, tells Inverse
I mean fair enough, there's gonna be a market for it.

I wonder though, if we put together a list of who buys which perfumes, do you reckon we're going to see a major rejection of the currently established trend?  This is the kind of information we need.  It's all well and good that the person making them doesn't care about the gender stuff, but if you're going to have a paradigm shift, you need to see if you're actually selling it as such.

If you happen to be making your scents unisex but one sex overwhelmingly buys one and the other a different one, that might tell you that your filling a ghost niche, one that only exists in your marketing literature.

I'm not saying don't do it.  I'm just saying, perhaps check your sales demographics before you start making such assertions.  Even if you don't gender your fragrances, there's a good chance that your consumers will.
The niche perfume industry has heralded the growth of a new, shamelessly rose and heather-scented man. “The men who are wearing fragrances today I think they are different from the men who were wearing fragrances years ago. […] They want to stand out. They’re a bit more assertive, in terms of what they like and what they don’t like,” says Blandin.
 That's true.  It's also true that teenage boys and girls also make up a large portion of this market, and they're just going to buy whatever is cheap.  It's also true that the working class individuals are a significant portion of this market, and like myself, don't really care what the smell is, so they're gonna buy the one that says it's for their gender.  I am a simple man, you see, and I like fewer choices.  I go to the store and buy the cheapest unscented deodorant I can find, or the least scented one if there's not one.  I don't particularly care if it smells like roses, or a campfire in Mordor.

I buy the one that says mens because it tends to work best and smell the least.
Niche perfumers were among the first to embrace unisex fragrances, which are now a quickly growing trend as well. Some of these independent perfumers have been creating fragrances that are intentionally deconstructed, a smell removed from any gendered connotations.
I thought you told me that people a century or two ago were the first to do that?

Dang hipsters.
For example, Christopher Brosius, one of the most revered iconoclasts of smell, does not use any gendered language with his fragrances. He instead opts for scents are deeply conceptual, capturing something more psychological than material, like “Where We Are There Is No Here,” “November,” and the E. M. Forster-inspired, “A Room With A View.”
Yeah, but you see, I'm not going to buy something that smells like nowhere because that just sounds like an empty bottle.  What does November smell like, I wonder?  Does it smell like a snow storm and road salt?  I wonder if a room with a view smells like a jail cell that has a small window.

I hate this kind of superfluous marketing bullshit, I guess. 

Dang hipsters.
Zoe Tambling, who is soon to launch her own perfume line, Agnes Fragrances, in Los Angeles, spent five months developing the scent of a Hurricane — of lightning, of rain on concrete. At one point, it hit her that rain on concrete smells like bell peppers, which she then tinctured and added to the fragrance.
I feel like they're just making stuff up now.
Her earlier creation, Stainless Steel, which she colored blue to resemble Windex, is not only outside of gender, but outside of anything remotely human.
Lemme tell you what, when I go out for a night on the town, what I want to smell like is steel wool.  Knives.  Power cables.  Arc welders.
“I wanted to make something that was totally cold and unfeeling,” she tells Inverse.
Well, to be fair, that does sound an awful lot like some corporations.  Maybe you could sell some to congress.

Blandin hopes that in the future, the men’s and women’s fragrance are eclipsed by unisex fragrances, so that nothing has a gender.
Why though?  Why does it matter if smells are gendered?  Are you losing sleep over the fact that some men are wearing perfumes or colognes based on what the market tells them to?  Are you so offended by the smell of Bod that you want to make sure no one ever wears it again?

Also, I just noticed, this article hasn't once recommended that women should be wearing scents that are traditionally mens, as a sign of equality, as a sign that the scents are truly without gender as they claim.

Funny thing, that.
“For me, what I would love to see is that we don’t have any more men and women’s fragrances. Let the people choose what they would like. Let the people whether they want a vanilla, a raspberry, a citrus, and don’t segment the market into men and women.”
Arguably the people are choosing what they like.  Arguably, the people want a segmented market, in general.  That's good for you, too, because it means you can create a third market segment to compete with them.

If everything becomes unisex then your niche goes away, after all.

Also, notice again, how they're talking about a very few scents here, and not ones typically worn by men, even though this shouldn't be a gendered thing I guess.
If current trends keep up, Blandin might just get her wish, and rose and musk will be, once again, in the domain of all genders.
Again, why does she care what other people wear?  How, exactly, will you know it is in the domain of both if people still preferentially choose other things and it just happens to continue being used primarily by women, or people stop using it altogether?

What is the actual resolution here, I wonder?  It sounds like the resolution is to make men wear scents that women typically wear without making women wear the scents that men typically wear.  What if men genuinely don't want to smell like those things and largely don't buy them, even if they're labelled in a unisex fashion.  Will this still be sexist somehow?  I'm sure they'll find a way to say so.  How will we know when this unisex movement succeeds, I guess, is what I'm asking.

I mean, I agree with article, effectively.  Wear whatever you want, and don't worry about stereotypes and stuff.  Still, what if everyone is already kinda doing that, and we've already hit peak unisex?  Do I actually have to go out of my way to buy something typically designed for women just to demonstrate my loyalty to this cause, or can I just say I agree and continue buying my unscented stuff?

The world may never know.