I ESCAPE ‘POUR HOMME’ HELL & BROUGHT YOU BACK THESE PERFUMES. Article by Thom Bettridge
IRIS CENDRÉ
Powdery flowers is a scent profile that we’ve been trained to associate with granny perfumes, but in order to free oneself from the shackles of the pour homme universe, one must go there and one must commit. Luckily for the flower-curious, perfumers like Naomi Goodsir are making iris- and violet-led perfumes that turn up with hits of tobacco and a smokiness that is reminiscent of a mouthful of peaty scotch.
From the desk of Highsnobiety Editor-in-Chief Thom Bettridge, The Materialist is an editor’s letter in the form of a treasure hunt. Its mission: to look closer at the products that fascinate us as a way to better understand ourselves and our world — or just to find better stuff. For this special FRONTPAGE edition, we're taking a deep dive into fragrances.
For decades, the world of marketing has accidentally conspired to turn young men off of fragrance.
As a child of the Y2K era, I was introduced to the concept of cologne through the frosted blue abs of Jean Paul Gaultier’s bottle for Le Male. Furthermore, my eardrums will forever be stained by the voice of a phone sex operator moaning “Look at that bod” over a popular and oft-maligned 15-second ad for a product called Bod Man Body Spray. And sometime during my elementary school career, a demented soul invented a thing called Axe. (An aside, but shout out to Axe for disowning whoever took their body spray with them into the US Capitol raid.)
Flash forward to 2021, and cultural evolution in men’s fragrance space has been minimal to nonexistent. Johnny Depp and Dior’s quest to make the most racist commercial of all time might be behind us, but even the luxury end of the pour homme world still seems made for a spectrum of humanity that starts with James Bond and ends with Pauly D. Aftershave. Muscles. Warfare. Suits. Barbershops. Dark blue packaging. The mental universe of cologne marketing embodies everything tragic and obsolete about being a man.
I needed to get introduced to perfume — in particular, the lively and unisex scene of niche perfumers — in order to truly understand the magic of fragrance. With the help of olfactory aesthetes in my life, I learned the joys of reeking like a fist full of jasmine. I embraced traces of roses and oud and peppercorns and the other mysterious aromas that ran around corners in my mind as I tried to identify them. And I walked to bodegas smelling like rare species of tree.
During quarantine, I set off down a deeper and more spiraling rabbit hole, sniffing and wear-testing the nearly 200 perfumes that went into the making of this review. Cloistered in my home office, searching for base notes in my mind’s eye, it came into focus that perfume is not inherently social. To smell good around others is a worthwhile endeavor, but the real fun of fragrance comes with using it as a form of mental travel, to the kinds of faraway places, people, and memories that are uniquely evoked by the olfactory senses.
So, without further ado, here are the finest fruits of my voyage, arranged across the traditional scent-wheel categories of Green, Woody, Spicy-slash-Amber, and Floral.
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