As long as we have worn fragrances, we have associated certain scents with desire. “That’s probably the most magical thing about perfume,” says Aurélien Guichard, the cofounder and creative director of the ingredient-focused French line Matiere Premiere. “When you create a perfume, you don’t think, Is a person going to be desirable when they wear it? But when it can awaken a feeling of sensuality in someone, there’s nothing in life that can do it other than perfume.”
Guichard discovered that unique erotic potential at a dinner party with his parents and their friends many years ago. As he helped a woman take her coat off, he took in a whiff of what he guessed to be Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue. “I remember for the first time feeling attraction for a woman just by the scent,” says the perfumer, who splits time between Matiere Premiere’s Paris headquarters and the lavender, tuberose, and rose fields he tends on his property in the French Riviera town of Grasse. “I grew up with quite a few perfumers from my father [who was also a nose],” he continues. “But from that day I thought how cool is that: to create something that awakens emotions.”
How we define a sensual scent couldn’t be more intimate. LVMH scion and By Kilian founder Kilian Hennessy will never forget the orange blossom, ginger, and overdosed vanilla aroma of Jean Paul Gautier for Woman when it launched. “I was 20 or 22, and when a woman in the club was wearing it, it was a magnet on me,” he says with a laugh. Cherry Cheng, the perfumer behind niche London-based line Jouissance, says there was nothing like the smell of Abercrombie Fierce when she first arrived in the United States as a young teen. “I fell completely under the spell of not only desiring that world, but wanting to become part of it,” she says.
“The same way we say that love is in the eye of the beholder, I would say that sexiness in a perfume is in the eye of the beloved,” says Hennessy, who is now known for the decadent and often ambery, booze-forward fragrances he creates for his namesake line. “If you really love a woman who wears Pleasures by Estée Lauder, which is a super delicate, transparent peony accord, you’re going to find her very, very sexy. But I would say that, traditionally, ‘sexiness’ comes from more the amber family.”
See on Guerlain Hennessy points to Guerlain’s 1925 fragrance Shalimar as the original sexy scent. The perfume—a warm, spicy ode to the love Emperor Shah Jahan had for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal—was the first to use vanillin and ethyl vanillin. “These were isolated components coming from vanilla and that allowed them to create the vanilla category,” Hennessy explains. This synthetic innovation was revolutionary, making the creamy, sweet, and almost woodsy vanilla note replicable even when the raw ingredient was incredibly scarce. It became the base of the conventional erotic scent, one that dominated concepts of sensuality in perfume for decades, with peak moments such as Yves Saint Laurent’s provocative 1977 release Opium.
The ambers of today are arguably gourmands. In 1992, Mugler introduced Angel, a heady mix of synthetic cotton candy, caramel, and plum fruits. Many credit Angel as the first scent in the category, a clear step away from the darker or more airy perfumes of the time.
This year, YSL Beauty released Black Opium Eau de Parfum Pink Glaze, an interpretation which adds a layer of fresh strawberries to the scent’s heady base.
Rihanna’s scent of choice, Baccarat Rouge 540, sits in this family. So do many of By Kilian’s fragrances, niche scents like DS&Durga’s new launch Ain’t That Sweet and more conceptually driven perfumes like Matiere Premiere’s Powder Vanilla.
See on Maison Francis Kurkdjian Of course, desire is subjective and trends are ever-evolving. Frank Voelkl, the nose behind Le Labo Santal 33, Glossier You, and Liberty LBTY’s cedarwood- and patchouli-layered Zephirine, says sexy scents have gone from darker ambers to fragrances of lighter, fluffier, creamier, and less animalistic textures. “Twenty, 30 years ago, sexy and sensual were considered a bit dirty,” he says. “Today, I would say it’s definitely clean. These fragrances get closer to your skin. The boundaries of gender have blurred. There has been a shift where we are not so much in the business of trying to please others, or seduce other people. It’s more about feeling desirable yourself.”
Clean could mean skin scents like Glossier You, Glossier Doux, or fresh offerings like the first-ever unisex scent CK One and Helmut Lang’s 2000-released namesake fragrance. (Jenny Holzer’s text “I smell you on my skin” was featured in print ads instead of an image of a bottle—talk about erotic.) Sex appeal could be related to certain notes, but it also could come from tension in compositional structure, Voelkl adds.
See on Ulta “What we find desirable is also culturally conditioned and constantly shifting,” says Cheng, whose own line Joussiance offers scents inspired by the erotic minds and literature of writers like Anaïs Nin and Catherine Millet.
Fabien Baron, the legendary art director behind Calvin Klein’s ’90s films, the Madonna Sex book, and Galliano’s new Zara campaign, defines the sensual scent most frankly of all: “To be honest, it’s nothing. And it’s incredible that you can attach so much of yourself to it and the feeling of being part of a story,” he says. In 1993, Baron sent then–real couple Kate Moss and Mario Sorrenti to Jamaica to shoot Calvin Klein Obsession; he brought the cool kids of the ’90s together for CK One a year later, translating the sweat of youth, sex, and androgyny to the first unisex scent in a simple water-flask bottle. These images, as much as anything in those bottles, made the fragrances desirable, a part of stories we could imagine and aspire to live in.
An erotic scent is equal parts constructed, a sign of the times, and your own, his work suggests. “You don’t even see it. When you wear it, it’s not there. There is nothing tangible,” says Baron. “[But] you can connect it to so many different layers of emotions.”
See on Amazon “It was the idea of sex, the idea of open sexuality. It was also healthy sex,” said Baron of Calvin Klein’s seminal scent, which is as relevant today as ever.
See on Sephora “Instead of using the vanilla and ethyl vanillin, Mugler used ethyl maltol,” says Hennessy of the house’s 1992 breakthrough. “Ethyl maltol is the sweet, very strong, very diffusive, very long-lasting note. And frankly, maltol is still very much the keynote of sensuality today.” Angel is an icon of the fragrance world. Its newest edition is the luminous second-skin interpretation Angel Blush, which came out earlier this year.
See on Serge Lutens Serge Lutens is a legend in the beauty industry: He developed Dior’s cosmetics and beauty products in 1967 at just 25 years old. His fragrance line has also been groundbreaking from its start. Ambre Sultan, an almost medicinal amber that challenges the category at its conceptual core, may be his sexiest offering.
See on Comme des Garçons Comme des Garçons’ radical Series 6 Synthetic explores the allure of manmade smells. Tar, with its mix of grilled cigarettes, gasoline, and bergamot, is for anyone who has ever lusted after someone in a smoky bar.
See on Gucci You can’t discuss sex and fragrance (or fashion, for that matter) without talking about Tom Ford. “He made it really intense and strong,” Baron says of Gucci Rush, the spicy peach-and-patchouli blend brought to life by a young Malgosia Bela, who was the face of the product when it launched in 1999.
See on Bluemercury Imagine tuberose, orange blossom, and jasmine awakening at night.
See on Escentric Molecules When it first came out in 2006, Escentric Molecules Molecule 01—a singular release, as it consists of just one note, Iso E—quickly became the U.K.’s androgynous, queer-coded answer to CK One. The original is still the fundamental skin scent. The newest take, Molecules 01 Clary Sage, adds a crisp herbaceous layer.
See on Tom Ford Beauty Tom Ford introduced the fragrance branch of his namesake label with the clear desire to bring to life taste that was deeper, richer, and more baroque than the airy scents that had dominated fragrance from the ’90s on. Black Orchid captures all his opulent dreams and then some.
See on By Kilian “It’s interesting that my brand is perceived as the sensual brand, because it’s not a goal to be sensual. It’s true that I do love those more woodsy, ambery vanilla accords,” says Hennessy. Love, Don’t Be Shy may be Hennessy’s most iconic sexy scent. His latest? Midnight Espresso, available in a trio of cocktail-inspired fragrances. “It is by far the most gourmand, the darker, the more sensual. And oops, miracle, it’s also my bestseller,” the perfumer adds with a grin.
See on Le Labo An intoxicating blend of fig, black tea leaves, and sensuous tobacco.
See on Glossier Skin scents keep evolving. Glossier You’s soft, warm interpretation is a blueprint.
See on Scentsplit When Berlin-based perfumer David Roelen discovered that 30 percent of women are wearing men’s colognes, he set out to create a scent for women that claims traditionally masculine notes in new form. “The concept behind Daddy was probably my middle finger to the industry,” he says.
See on Nordstrom “French Flower was created with the idea that there’s something very special in the smell of a tuberose field at night. That is very sensual,” says Guichard.
See on Sephora “[A fragrance like Father Figure] is about self-expression,” says Voelkl, the fragrance’s creator. Picture: a dewy fig against the skin, creamy musks and Madagascar vanilla, and a hint of iris.
See on Nonfiction A magnolia-doused musk from Seoul’s freshest perfume line. “Its sexiness is not overt but lies in the contrast between a seductive dark silhouette and an unexpectedly elegant skinlike trail,” says perfumer Maurice Roucel.
See on Jouissance Cheng says her most overtly sensual scent is La Bague D’O. “Voluptuous rose and jasmine are set against tarry castoreum and the slightly animalic smell of skin,” she says. “It’s about the tension between something beautiful and something carnal.”
See on Nordstrom Omani house Amouage is known for its exceptionally sophisticated scents. Purpose 50 is a smoky, woodsy, and utterly intoxicating standout.
See on Vyrao A flirtatious milky peach with a base of latex.
See on Frederic Malle Frederic Malle has given us many scents that lean toward the erotic. The house’s newest drop explores a more intimate, introspective concept of desire. Northern Love blends woody accords with spice notes and jasmine absolute; it’s all about the quiet contradictions of yearning.
See on DS&Durga “The vanilla binds sweetness to the skin with spices and amber that smell very attractive to most people,” says David Seth Moltz, one-half of cult fragrance brand DS&Durga. The scent is the brand’s latest release—billed as a narcotic blend of malty date and bourbon vanilla.
Source: ShowBiz
