Last week I went to Nordstrom in search of a spritz of Hermès Bel Ami. I’d recently discovered that I liked its citrus-coriander-leather goodness even better than that of Bois 1920 Come La Luna, and I was trying decide if I needed to save up for a bottle. “Bel Ami? Is that for a guy? You’ll have to go upstairs,” the sales associate at the perfume counter told me. All the masculines were on the second floor.

My first thought was, Crazy! they’re losing out on a potentially huge market for the masculines by putting them somewhere women were less likely to discover them. My second thought was, what is the difference between a fragrance marketed to women and one marketed to men?

At the back of The Book of Perfume by Elisabeth Barillé and Catherine Laroze is a chart of fragrances broken down by type — citrus, citrus spicy, floral, floral aldehyde, etc. — and by gender. A casual glance through the chart shows that the authors classify the preponderance of florals as for women. The exception is the category “single lavender floral”, all of which are listed for men. The fougères, except Guerlain Jicky and a few others, are listed for men, and the woody fragrances were also marked entirely as masculine, except for Shiseido Féminité du Bois…

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