Derek Deng started thinking about how queer people use perfume after a Grindr hookup . “He was wearing Dior Sauvage and was kind of the embodiment of the perfume: vaguely threatening, vaguely aggressive. That was his vibe. And it really got me thinking about the relationship between fragrance and sexuality.”
After the encounter, the beauty editor set about on some nose-to-the-ground journalism, asking people he met on Grindr, Hinge and, eventually, Google Forms – Deng now has an olfactory compendium with over 25,000 responses – about the perfumes they wear, with questions like “do you identify as more dom or sub?” and “who is your fave pop girly?”. What started as a one-off “gay perfume matrix”, mapping scents along top-bottom, masc-femme axes, has now snowballed into a comprehensive TikTok series amassing hundreds of thousands of views, covering everything from “rich gay fragrances” to “do you smell like a bisexual millennial?”.
“I think for a lot of queer people, experimenting with perfume allows them to build a kind of self-mythology,” says Deng, who wears Nashi Toro by ānti, a French perfumer . Perfume is an integral part of queer people’s self-expression, he says, a subtle but important way to communicate information about our identities. “I don’t think straight people have to think about how they present themselves in the same way.”
The results of Deng’s perfume polls confirm this thesis. Masc-identifying men overwhelmingly chose uber-macho, crotch-grabbing musks like Dior Homme, scents heavy on animalic leather accords, warm vanillas and choking clouds of oud; twinks and femmes, meanwhile, leant toward softer florals and gourmands.
Bi folk liked accords “outside the olfactory binary” such as Aesop Hywl, and trans women largely went for “girly girl scents with strong projections” like Angel Nova by Mugler, a rich helix of lychee, raspberry and Damascus rose.
Fragrance has long been used as a way to sniff out sexuality. As early as the 17th century, pejoratives like “jessamy” – derived from “jasmine” – were coined from the flowery scents it was believed gay men wore.
English sexologist Havelock Ellis argued in the late 19th century that “hyperosmia” – that is, a heightened sense smell – was a sure-tell symptom of “sexual inversion”, since gay men revel in “sexually abnormal tendencies”, such as oral sex, where “olfactory influences play a certain part”. When Alfred Taylor, an associate of Oscar Wilde, was put on trial around the same period for “gross indecency” (i.e., being gay), the fact his home smelt of burnt incense and exotic flowers was presented in court as compelling evidence.
“There are definitely notes and fragrance that have historically been associated with femininity, masculinity or queerness,” says Cherry Cheng, founder of erotic literature-inspired perfumer Jouissance . This summer, she released a collaborative fragrance with Hackney lesbian bar La Camionera , forward on notes on vanilla, tonka, sweet almond and jasmine.
“Smell is so important to self-expression and embodiment,” she continues. “It announces somebody’s presence in a room before they say anything.
It quite literally allows you to take up space.”
Whereas the brands featured on Deng’s matrix are mostly big shots in the smell-o-sphere – queer favourites included legacy names like Tom Ford and Margiela – Jouissance is one in a number of smaller houses that have recently aimed products straight at the queer consumer. The same month that La Camionera was released, Boy Smells – the LA-based, queer-owned perfume brand – re-released its Citrush fragrance, a poppers-inspired fragrance with notes of pomelo and musk.
Discothèque, whose hedonistic scents pay homage to extinct clublands, has also put out smells inspired by legendary queer havens like Leigh Bowery’s Taboo (notes of musk, cashmere, leather and pink pepper). “Scent and memory are two of the most connected parts of our brain,” says co-founder Jessie Willner. “Perfumery is an artform well-suited to the ephemeral” – whether that be throbbing, ecstatic visions of a bygone dancefloor or the fluttering contours of somebody’s self-expression.
The emergence of identity-carved perfume niches has been helped by the broader rise of niche perfumes, says Deng, which mobilise more abstract, emotion-based approaches to scent. Toskovat, the Bucharest-based small-batch perfumer launched in 2022, has spritzed itself into infamy with “extraits de memoire” inspired by trauma, conflict and sex. “Fantasy notes” like kitten fur and wet concrete have also come into vogue, as have phantasmatic smells such as “the ghost of Grace Kelly” .
“When I speak to older people about what a ‘queer smell’ means to them,” says Winder Tom, the molecular scientist-cum-nose behind LGBTQ+-owned perfumery Urania, “they’ll say something like a gay sauna or poppers. But younger people will say ‘playing in the rain’. They’re more attracted to concepts and emotions.”
Urania first launched its take on a queer smell – named Queer Magic – in 2021, when the norm was still for fragrances to be pigeonholed into “for men” and “for women” crannies, says Tom, often by brands dictating to consumers what their maisons and devotees must smell of. However, he wanted to bottle something that spoke to the diversity and “opalescence” of the queer community.
“Think about if you go to a queer event. You’ll see so many types of queer people expressing themselves in different ways.
That’s what I wanted to capture.”
His solution was to create a perfume with “a little bit of everything and that expresses a lot”: bright, tropical spices and gourmands like cardamom and Brazilian lime, sensual florals and creamy fig leaf, mixed with sacred woods like palo santo and oud.
Deng agrees that perfumes appealing to individuality are especially popular among queer buyers. Ambroxan, a synthetic molecule that enhances the natural scent of its wearers, was the most common accord in his queer perfume surveys.
Le Labo AnOther 13 – an ambroxan-heavy scent made in collaboration with DAZED and AnOther co-founder Jefferson Hack – was number one among gay men; Glossier You, a pioneer in ambroxan perfumes, was a favourite of lesbians and the “unspoken truce” between queer women and twinks.
Escentric Molecules, the London perfumer that started experimenting with ambroxan in 2008, has proudly described all its scents as “non-binary”. “Fragrance has no gender,” explains co-founder Geza Schoen over email, “so why limit perfume to prescribed categories? The idea that smell belongs to one gender is something we’re taught. Fragrance gives us an opportunity to question those associations rather than accept them.”
In other words, there’s no such thing as an inherently masculine smell, or a feminine smell, or indeed a “queer” smell. Some fragrances can have “queer-coded” qualities, argues Deng, citing ambroxan and some floral notes increasingly common in masculine and unisex perfumes, like violet and iris. But queerness, expressed in so many different ways by so many different people, can’t be boiled down to a single thing – that’s part of the beauty of it.
“A perfume is about the wearer,” says Winder Tom, “it’s about what each person makes of it.” That, it turns out, can manifest in a litany of ways: from a DL hookup dousing himself in super-masc Dior Sauvage as a sort of olfactory drag, to somebody spritzing a scent that reminds them of long nights – music loud, skin wet, bodies close – with the people they love. But ultimately, a smell’s meaning remains in the eyes – or the nose – of its beholder.
“Scent is so personal,” Tom concludes. “What matters is how it resonates for you.”
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