I have never really had a smell. What I mean is, I maintained a stink-avoidant posture, not a pro-smell position. I defined my personal aroma by avoiding stink, not by making myself smell better.
This was true for the first 48 years of my life. I was happy. I was clean. I moved through life with a blank odor, a whiff of, at most, deodorant and soap.
Until I had an epiphany: There are people in my life who smell good. More than avoiding stink, they surround themselves with pleasant odors. Why can’t I smell good, too?
Previously, I had a very limited exposure to cologne. When confronted by cologne in the wild, it mostly reminded me of the stink of WVU in 1996, frat boy beer farts, sex-starved dorm dudes wearing jewelry, smashed into the PRT. Gold chains and ugly shirts and red solo cups and stale, bottom-shelf beer.
But the people in my life who smelled good defied those bad scent memories. They were mostly women, for some reason, maybe because women are more likely to wear fragrances? That’s pure conjecture. Let’s see what Google says. Okay, yes I am right. According to this research, 71% of women and 29% of men wear perfume.
The origin of my low opinion is irrelevant because I am here, now, with those scent memories and attendant feelings. I still think most of them stink! And yet.
And Yet!
In December of 2025, I discovered that I do not loathe all male scents and in fact there are some fragrances I enjoy quite a lot. A confluence of events and realizations led me to the hallowed halls of websites I had never known existed, like Scent Split and Fragrantica.
The realization I had was this: sometimes somebody around me will be wearing a fragrance that I enjoy so therefore mightn’t I find some that I could wear, too? Maybe I had spent all this time smelling the wrong smells. After all, what’s the difference between fragrances for women and fragrances for men? The distinctions seem arbitrary to me, like blue for boys and pink for girls.
I have enjoyed reading BD McClay and Margaret Welsh‘s fragrance writing — they can pull apart the differences in these smells whereas I just get quaffes. They can write about these eau de perfums with nuance, like a critic writes about things.
Could it be that my limited exposure to fashion or lifestyle or beauty (or whatever this genre is) is not helping me understand how to write about fragrances? Does that limit my enjoyment? Is “fragrances” even the right word? I suppose I could say “perfume” but that’s gendered in American english (not that it matters to me, see below).
You Don’t Need to Know The Lexicon to Understand the Language
I once told a friend that I didn’t really feel like I have a valid opinion on a piece of art because I don’t have the vocabulary or depth of an art admirer. I can’t tell if what I’m looking at is “good,” like in the context of its peers, so to speak. For instance, I know enough (just enough) about painting to know that Thomas Kinkade’s work is cringe and lowbrow despite looking broadly like paintings that are typically considered “good.”
So she told me to not think too deeply about it. What did it make me feel when I looked at it? This first reaction, this aesthetic impression is enough. Do I like it? Then it’s good. Is it technically proficient? That’s another matter.
I am reminded of Jamelle Bouie’s famously negative review of a largely beloved Star Wars movie, Rogue One. I can’t argue with any of his points about the movie’s faults and I also can’t argue that it’s a “good” movie, but I do know that I liked it anyway. All of these things can be true and arguments about whether it’s “good” or not sometimes really do boil down to “I liked this particular piece of art enough to overlook flaws that, to someone else, would be damning.” Whether those faults exist or not is another discussion entirely.
Criticism Helps You Enjoy Things Better
But to be an uncritical, or aesthetic-only appreciator of things is to miss the nuances. I know that I like Rogue One despite the thin development of its hero and the inadequate first act, but I have been watching and reading about movies my whole life. I have a good grasp of the decisions made at different points of the filmmaking process and I have just enough knowledge of the craft to be able to identify what parts of it are effective and why. I also have a pretty good grasp of stories and how they work and why and how their bits come together.
I have an aesthetic impression of many things and I don’t particularly feel the need to increase the depth of my appreciation beyond that first or maybe second feeling. Food, for instance. I am open to eating pretty much anything, but I approach flavors with a broadsword instead of a scalpel. I haven’t learned the distinct flavor notes within the entire flavor profile, so to speak. I don’t even know if that’s the right way to frame it! I don’t really care, either. I like eating. Some yums, some yucks, whatever. Just feed me.
Knowing about writing and stories and craft and constantly thinking about how stories work and how a writer creates tension and emotions and evokes a reaction from the reader helps me become a more discerning enjoyer. My story experience is applicable to lots of kinds of stories, books or stories but movies and tv shows and plays, too. I don’t know which camera lenses are better than others for a given shot, and I can’t tell method acting from any other kind of acting, but I can tell you when the dialogue stinks.
When I see a movie like Nolan’s The Odyssey, I see the ham-handed moral of the story and I think Odysseus is a blunt dufus instead of a wiley trickster, but I also enjoyed the depiction of the Cyclops as a kind of alien creature. The face he makes as he chomps on Odysseus’s men reminds me of the senseless, routine violence of a crab eating its young. It was an upsetting image! I can be aware of the faults of the art yet still enjoy it.
Can I Be a Critical Enjoyer of Fragrances?
Man, I don’t know.
It feels like a lot. I mean a lot a lot. On one level, I’m happy to spray a tincture of liquid on myself, sit with it a while, and do some variation of the Kombucha face.
But I feel like I could be a more discerning fragrance enjoyer. I feel as though perhaps the same enjoyment I wring from stories and books and movies is available to me if I had a fuller vocabulary of words to use to describe it. You know, like a critic.
But first things first. Before I get my hands on the vocabulary of fragrance, I need to try some fragrances on. It’s smelling good that I want, after all. Time to smell some smells.
Having decided that I don’t like any colognes many years ago, I had the enviable task of starting completely fresh. I mean fresh-fresh, with zero biases or prejudices and guided by nothing but my nose, a completely clean slate. So I ordered a pack of samplers. A few packs of samplers, actually. The one above had words like “designer” and “high end” in the title. It seemed like a good place to start.
I sprayed a different scent on myself roughly every day for as long as the samples lasted. Pretty long! And I made a spreadsheet to track the ones I liked and the ones I didn’t like.
It didn’t start great. As you can see, the first one I tried was gross. If it reminds me of college, then it goes in the bin. There’s another smell I call “wormy” that I don’t have the words to describe beyond “it smells like worms.”
The first one, from Armani, was a no-go. I could have stopped there and reaffirmed my prior opinion that all colognes are bad, but I soldiered on and scored an immediate goal.
The Hermes Un Jardin sur le Nil, a buncha French words that mean “A Garden on the Nile” enchanted me. My notes say “mattress factory” which is an art museum here in Pittsburgh and is where I made a lot of very nice memories. You might also see “stifel” in those notes — I also have a lot of fond memories in and around the Stifel Fine Arts Center in my hometown and those fragrances make me have nice thoughts instead of the depressing stress I feel when I smell those damn worms.
Is this how other people approach fragrances? Am I weirdly tuned into scent memories, or is that a pretty normal thing? I don’t know how else to categorize the smells I encounter except in the context of my experience, and I don’t really have a different context for this new hobby. Is it a hobby? I suppose it is! I have a spreadsheet and everything.
And Then I Met Jo Malone
You can see a pattern if you look closely at my sheet (though I don’t know why you would) — when I encounter a fragrance I like, I take a dive. This is what I do when I come across a new author or genre that I like: I dive deep and dig up as much as I can (or until the next new thing comes along).
One of my samples was English Pear and Freesia by Jo Malone. It made me do the heart-eyes from the emoji. I couldn’t believe it. This was what I was seeking, this was the experience I was digging for, the dragon I was chasing. It hit me in all the right places. Hello, Jo. Enchanté.
I don’t know what she puts in those bottles, but I’m a true blue fan.
Not only has my foray into fragrances introduced me to a whole new vocabulary (like “sillage” which I’m still not sure about), it has given me a team to root for, a house to belong to, a flag to fly. I like to think my experiences are all unique but there are actual stores that sell Jo Malone fragrances and that’s all. It blew my mind, which is a silly thing to say about a perfume store, but what can I say? This is a new experience for me.
Is it Perfume or Cologne? It Might be Both?
I am continuing to experiment with fragrances and try some out. I’m taking the impetus that spurred me to try these smells out and applying it more broadly. If I liked one company’s fragrances, there are probably more out there.
As for the question in the heading, I know that the terms for these fragrances are many and mostly French, but the distinctions between those two is a cultural one. Among the knowledgeable fragrance fans, the difference between those words isn’t who is wearing it but how strong the smell is.
As for myself, I find the unisex fragrances much more preferable over the conventionally gendered ones. The “girly” ones remind me of women, and the “manly” ones remind me of dudes, but I find myself happily squatting in the middle of the aisle, a fragrance moderate. The Jo Malone scents I enjoy all have that in common: they’re unisex.
What’s next? What new smell safari will I embark upon? Who knows? Maybe if you have some ideas for me, you can send me a message. Is there something you know that seems kinda like the stuff I like, maybe you can help me!
Oh Yeah, a Fat Bear Update
I mentioned when I started becoming interested in fragrances because this is an important fact — it is also when I started taking a GLP-1. It’s beyond the scope of what I’m writing here, but there’s a weird link between those drugs and new interest in pleasant fragrances. And I’ve lost 40 lbs, so the fat bear is a little less fat than he was before. Not bad.
Same shirt. I need a haircut though.