"For me, it's a great joy to smell a fragrance I did for men, worn by a woman. A perfume should never be reserved for one sex because smells have no sex," [Mathilde Laurent] told me at the New York City launch of Cartier's new eau de parfum, L'Envol, which is technically for men but something I'd wear in a heartbeat...Though we were sitting at a table with the marketing team, Laurent's role is the art of the juice itself, and she wasn't afraid to say that the separation of categories is just a ploy. It's not uncommon for a company to use clichés—it's a business after all—but she said Cartier works to avoid them. "It's an old habit to put a naked woman or man on the advertising to tell you, 'It's for you!' We have come to a kind of caricature of being a woman or man in perfume, but like our society, there's no reason to separate," she said.

— Perfumer Mathilde Laurent of Cartier talks about gendered fragrances in Here's What One French Perfumer Has to Say About Women Wearing Men's Fragrances at Allure.