The Real Difference Between Men’s and Women’s Fragrances
Perfumes are generally categorized as genderless fragrances that both men and women alike use as an accessory to enhance their natural, unique, and individual scents. They are an amazing and powerful component that helps boost confidence and sophistication for whoever happens to be wearing them. On the market today, there are thousands of scents and fragrance notes found in perfumes and fragrances. These include such scents as floral notes, fresh, oriental, woody, and musky scents, to just name a few. However, the hot debate nowadays is not about the variety of scents available to a person. It’s whether perfumes are really genderless or if it really matters if a person uses a particular perfume just because it’s been labeled “for men” or “for women.”
Before adding confusion to an already hotly debated issue, we first need to answer the question about the differences between male and female perfumes and how people can tell them apart. There are at least two factors that need to be considered when trying to distinguish masculine and feminine perfumes from each other. The first factor is the label itself—most labels identify the perfumes they contain as something like Eau de Perfume spray for either “Men” or for “Women,” depending on the what gender the scent is formulated for. This usually makes buying a gender-specific perfume fairly easy.
The second factor is the combination of scents that form the 3 layers of the perfume: the top, the middle and the base of the fragrance. This is where it gets really tricky. Perfumers do not brew original scents according to whether they are male or female. They just try to replicate a naturally occurring scent—like an ocean breeze, a certain spice or a particular flower. They then combine these primal scents with other scents to make up a scent profile that is unique. This perfume’s scent profile may then be labeled as either male or female, as needed for marketing purposes.
If you read through the ingredients on most perfume labels, you’ll also realize that most manufacturers’ use the same elements as other manufacturers. So it’s not just how the scent is composed but also how it is brewed that determines whether a scent is predominately male or female. Perfumes that are woody, musky, aromatic, strong and leathery are usually considered to be masculine perfumes. Floral, fresh, fruity, sweet and light scents are usually considered to be feminine. This is usually how male and female perfumes are separately categorized nowadays.
Of course, scent can also be a subjective experience and can’t always be dictated by marketing. Each person has their own unique scent, so some perfumes smell differently on different people. A guy may choose a more feminine perfume because it complements his unique scent and not because he feels feminine. Just like how women may find themselves drawn to more masculine perfumes because they may be more powerful than what the woman can buy on the perfume market today. It just goes to prove that the selection of a perfume is not always easy and can’t always be predicated on the gender of the wearer.
