What makes a scent seductive?

“A blooming bush of jasmine might evoke memories of falling in love for some, but make others feel homesick or heartbroken.”

There’s something witchy about spritzing on a perfume before heading out in pursuit of romance. Nothing has the power to seduce – or repulse – quite like fragrance. But what makes a scent seductive?

Smell triggers our memory receptors more than any of our other senses. Spray paint fumes and mildew remind me of my first sharehouse, Hawaiian Tropic sunscreen takes me to the hot tent of a New Year’s kiss, Calvin Klein One and cigarettes conjure an ex without a bed frame. It’s funny how the scents we used to find seductive can sour overnight.

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Using perfume to attract a lover has to be the most famous olfactory objective in history. Cleopatra was said to have had her own perfume workshop and apparently, she’d rub her mouth with solid perfume before kissing a lover, hoping the scent would force him to think of her after they parted. Legend has it that she even had the sails of her barge drenched in perfume before sailing out to meet her lover, Mark Antony. Huge queen move.

“Fragrance has been used as a tinder to fan the fire of desire for centuries,” writes American perfumer Mandy Aftel in her book, Essence and Alchemy. Age-old stories from around the world speak to the role of scent in attraction.

In ancient Jerusalem, young women would put myrrh and balsam in their shoes and walk about the marketplace. If they saw a young man they fancied, they’d kick their feet, spurting the perfume towards him as a way of flirting. In 17th-century England, certain aromatics such as musk, ambergris and frankincense were considered to be sexually stimulating.

Mandy’s book tells of many more. In the Amazon, she writes, Yanomami men carry sachets of fragrant powders that supposedly “make women tumble into their arms” and in the highlands of New Guinea, “shamans say incantations over ginger leaves, which are thought to lend allure to the man who rubs them on his face and body”.

Look at any modern cologne advertisement, the same narrative is implied: man smells good, man attracts beautiful lady. I had my first encounter with a ‘flirtatious fragrance’ when I was nine years old. A birthday present from my older sister’s friend, it came in a pink-tinted bottle with ‘So…? Kiss Me’ scribbled next to a red lipstick smooch.

It’s since been discontinued, but Fragrantica.com tells me this 2004 vintage opened with blackcurrant and pineapple notes, drying down to musk and vanilla. For a whole summer, I’d spritz my new perfume over my pot-bellied, tankini-clad body and dream of running into Seth Cohen from The O.C.

There’s something witchy about spritzing your pulse points with fragrance before heading out in pursuit of romance – imaginary or not. But what exactly makes a scent ‘flirtatious’? Well, it depends on who you ask. Before PerfumeTok and Fragrantica existed, writers and psychologists tried to explain the role of scent in our sensual imaginations.

Neurologist Sigmund Freud believed the nose was related to the sexual organs and therefore, he considered the loss of smell to be a major cause of mental illness. French poet Charles Baudelaire suggested that it wasn’t just the perfume a woman wore, but the natural scent of her body that made her smell ‘lustily musky’.

American writer Henry Miller (a certified freak) took this idea a step further, describing how “distinctly pleasurable, distinctly memorable” he found the smell of a woman’s genitals – a scent Gwyneth Paltrow famously captured and poured into a wax candle in 2020.

Theories aside, there’s science behind what Baudelaire and Miller were writing about: pheromones, coming from the Greek pherin (to transfer) and hormōn (to excite). Pheromones are the chemical substances produced in the body that trigger a biological response, often sexual, in members of the same species.

It (sort of) explains why ‘vabbing’, the practice of wearing your vaginal juices as perfume, became a trend on TikTok a few years ago, and why civet, an ingredient extracted from the anal glands of exotic cats, has such a strong erotic reputation in perfumery – it was used in Chanel No.5 up until 1998.

These animalistic, pheromone-inspired notes are having a moment in niche perfumery. I was curious to ask Jessica Tate, co-owner of Lore Perfumery in Melbourne, about Sécrétions Magnifiques, a polarising fragrance by Etat Libre d’Orange that smells a bit like sweat and semen. “We get all kinds of reactions! Being inspired by bodily scents, this fragrance is like the ultimate pheromone scent. You’re either here for it or repulsed,” she says.

I fall into the latter category. But if you’re looking to weed out the faint-hearted and attract someone with the same ‘nose’ as you, perhaps it’s your potion. While more risqué smells are on the rise (a new local label, Örök Fragrance, takes its inspiration from Melbourne’s gay club scene), Jessica, along with the buyers for some of Australia’s largest beauty retailers, like Mecca and Adore Beauty, agree the overpowering trend right now is gourmand. This category encompasses edible notes – think vanilla, juicy stonefruit and salted caramel.

While less on the nose than Sécrétions Magnifiques, is there still a connection between gourmands and seduction? “Absolutely,” says Jessica. “People want to smell good enough to eat, and these fragrances are generally universally popular and enjoyed.” Many of Lore’s customers come in specifically looking for a sexy scent, Jessica tells me.

“They may have a date coming up, they may have just started a new relationship and want a scent to mark the occasion, they may have just ended a relationship, and thus need a new seductive scent,” she says. “We’ve had a proposal in-store while buying fragrance before, we’ve even had a customer break up with their boyfriend in-store, because he didn’t like the scent she was obsessed with! We’ve seen it all when it comes to fragrance and seduction.”

As Mandy Aftel points out in her research, context is often what makes a scent truly alluring. When I think about the fragrances that intrigue me the most, I tend to agree: they set a scene. Byredo’s Tobacco Mandarin – a distinctly darker juice than the brand’s bestsellers – reminds me of the freshly burnt citrus peel in a negroni, sipped in a smoky tavern opposite a lover.

The rich vanilla amber accord of Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s Oud Satin Mood makes me feel like a glamorous layabout in a ’70s James Bond film. Perdrisât’s Nightstand, a symphony of wisteria, lilac and musk, captures the feeling of fleeing a garden party to go home and do your skincare routine – great for when you want to romanticise your own company.

Is there a universal note of attraction? Probably not. A blooming bush of jasmine might evoke memories of falling in love for some, but make others feel homesick or heartbroken. So maybe it’s best to consider your own pleasure as the wearer, not just the  intoxicating trail you want to leave behind.

“It always makes me a little sad when someone loves a fragrance but their friend or partner says something negative, so they talk themselves out of loving it,” says Jessica. “It’s like fashion: there are people who wear things to impress and be seductive and people who wear what empowers them, and that, as a result, makes them so sexy.”

This article was originally published in Fashion Journal issue 197.

For more on the history of perfume, head here.