Fragrance and Gender

“What do I wear in bed? Why, Chanel No.5, of course”

Almost everyone knows this is one of famous quotes of Marilyn Monroe, American singer and actress, sex symbol, and Hollywood icon. For the people who know of Marilyn Monroe but not Chanel No.5, it is the first fragrance of Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel in 1921. As Andy Warhol chose Chanel No. 5 as cultural icon, it is often considered as “the world’s legendary fragrance”. One static said it is sold world-wise every 55 seconds.

Wearing nothing else but Chanel No. 5, how much can it sound sexier and more exotic? However, what if Marilyn Monroe said she wears Georgia Armani Acqua Di Gio instead of Chanel N.5, would it sound still attractive and appealing? If your girlfriend wears the cologne that your father wears, or if your boyfriend wears the fragrance that your grandmother uses, would you be irritated or disturbed? If so, why?

Selecting a perfume scent is an act of expressing an individual’s taste. Because of differences in body temperatures and odors, no perfume will smell exactly the same on any other people. Perfume itself theoretically should not be able to speak for users’ private, subjective, self-created modern self. But why is there a subconscious expectation that women should smell like flowers while men smell citrusy and musky?

Over thousand years, people have used a bottle of fragrance for the same purpose, either to mask unpleasant body odor or enhance naturally pleasant body odor. When the perfume became widespread in the monarchy, France’s king Louise XIV was known as “the perfume king” because of his love of floral scent. Bowles filled with dried flowers were placed throughout the palace to freshen the air. Clothes, furniture, walls, and tableware were sprayed with floral scent. He even required his court members to wear the fragrance every day. At this point, fragrance did not discriminate feminine and masculine but rather royal or common.

After the introduction to synthetic chemicals, perfumes could be mass produced since the late 1800s. Synthetic compound provides fragrance that cannot be found in nature, such as, linalool, coumarin, and orchid scent. Modern day perfume can capture any scent from plant sources, animal sources, and synthetic sources. Various processes of manufacturing perfume allowed average consumer to own a bottle of perfume as a common use product in the United States. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, designers entered the market with their signature bottle of perfume. With online retailers and market places, perfumes become more and more accessible to people. Even with diversity and accessibility of perfume, they are categorized as men and women in the department and online stores. Women fragrance uses colors of pink, red, yellow, gold, white, light blue, silver. The description of top selling women fragrances always happen to include the words; feminine and floral, sometimes, classic and sweet. On the other hand, black, navy blue, grey, brown, and green are commonly used for cologne and its bottles. According to men’s fragrance advertisements, men should smell fresh and woody, an ideal masculine smell of men.

The scents, bottles, advertisements, marketing, and branding evokes that feminine women and masculine men are the desirable and ideal in the American society. The stereotyped-gender fragrance creates fantasies and icons for one sex and even for the opposite sex. Their limited variety of choices confine consumers to be forced into the expected image of male and female gender roles of today's society,