Scent as Subversion: Perfume, Identity, and the Politics of Smell

Perfume is private in a peculiar way. It sits on the body, often beneath the level of conscious attention, yet it enters a room before conversation does. Other people encounter it whether or not they know its name, its ingredients, or what we intended by wearing it.

That makes fragrance unusually suited to carrying social meaning.

A scent can suggest intimacy, wealth, cleanliness, sexuality, age, gender or belonging without saying any of those things explicitly. Those associations are not inherent to rose, musk or patchouli. They develop through culture, history and repetition, and they change.

Sometimes the wearer participates willingly. Sometimes the meaning is assigned by somebody else.

This is where perfume becomes politically interesting. Not because every bottle is a manifesto, but because smell has repeatedly been used to distinguish who belongs, who does not, how a body is expected to present itself, and what happens when someone refuses the expectation.

Research on commercially marketed perfumes makes the point unusually clear. In blind smelling experiments, sociologist Karen Cerulo found that participants could often infer the kinds of people, situations and social meanings manufacturers intended their perfumes to evoke even without seeing the advertising. Scent, in other words, can become culturally legible beyond the campaign surrounding it.

Perfume is personal. It is simply not only personal.

One of the most literal examples comes from the French Revolution.

During the revolutionary period, Muscadin became a political insult. The term eventually became associated with fashionably dressed young anti-Jacobins, particularly the jeunesse dorée who emerged prominently after the fall of Robespierre.

The name itself carried an olfactory accusation.

Historian Jean-Alexandre Perras has examined the Muscadin as a political figure whose identity was inseparable from the idea of musk. Whether every young man being described actually drenched himself in perfume was almost beside the point. The scented caricature represented aristocratic affectation, luxury, effeminacy and reaction against revolutionary virtue. The smell did ideological work.

This is a more complicated story than saying perfume moved neatly from aristocratic excess to democratic simplicity after 1789.

Political upheaval did not make scent disappear. Instead, perfume itself could become part of the vocabulary through which political identities were mocked, recognized and opposed.

Musk could indicate more than musk.

It could suggest whose side you were thought to be on.

The Revolutionary Muscadin also belonged to a longer European suspicion of the excessively scented man.

In eighteenth-century England, strong perfume increasingly collided with changing ideas about privacy and polite behavior. William Tullett's history of smell describes criticism of figures such as the Macaroni, whose elaborate dress and perfuming could be read as both effeminate and intrusive.

The issue was not simply that perfume smelled artificial. A strongly scented body imposed itself on shared space.

Tullett describes this tension as part of emerging codes of “privacy in public.” In increasingly crowded and anonymous social environments, conspicuous perfume could become an atmospheric affront, something other people were forced to experience.

This is a useful reminder that the social meaning of perfume has rarely been stable.

There have been periods when abundant scent demonstrated luxury and refinement, and others when restraint carried greater prestige. A perfume could make someone appear cultivated in one environment and vulgar in another.

The politics of fragrance often begins at exactly that unstable boundary between self-expression and the expectations placed on a body.

Gender offers perhaps the clearest contemporary example.

It is easy to look at the modern fragrance counter and imagine that rose simply belongs to women while woods, aromatic herbs and darker materials somehow belong to men.

Historically, that distinction is much less fixed.

Jonathan Reinarz's study of gender and smell traces periods in which masculine and feminine scent categories were considerably less defined, arguing that the sharply gendered olfactory landscape familiar from twentieth-century perfumery is a comparatively recent development.

Modern marketing strengthened those associations. Bottles, names, advertising, color and the physical separation of fragrance departments helped create the impression that smells themselves possessed gender.

Yet actual olfactory perception does not always obey the categories.

In a 2013 study, psychologist Anna Lindqvist asked participants to classify perfumes by gender. Only fragrances perceived at the extreme ends of masculine or feminine qualities consistently aligned with their commercial classification. Much of the rest occupied a more continuous perceptual spectrum than the market's binary categories implied.

The rose does not know which side of the counter it was placed on.

That does not make gendered scent meaningless. Precisely because the codes are learned and recognizable, they can become useful tools for identity.

A 2025 qualitative study by Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith interviewed transgender people about scent, fragranced products and gender identity. Participants described perfume and other scented products as part of gender exploration and affirmation, sometimes deliberately choosing fragrances socially coded differently from the gender they had been assigned at birth.

Some also described fragrance as a way of influencing how other people perceived them, including attempts to reduce misgendering. Others simultaneously valued the affirming effect of masculine or feminine scent categories while questioning why those categories existed in the first place.

That tension is much more interesting than saying gender-neutral fragrance is automatically rebellious.

A conventional fragrance can become unconventional on a particular body. A very traditionally masculine cologne may provide comfort and affirmation to one wearer while feeling restrictive to another.

The politics lies less in the ingredient than in the relationship between the person, the cultural code and the freedom to choose.

Niche fragrance has been particularly receptive to this loosening of gender categories, though it did not invent it. Many contemporary houses simply present perfume without requiring a masculine or feminine destination.

What once looked like a radical merchandising choice can eventually become ordinary.

That is often how cultural change works.

The politics of smell becomes much darker when we move beyond perfume.

Historians of olfaction have documented the long history of using odor to classify people by class, ethnicity, occupation and race. Jonathan Reinarz describes smell as part of cultural systems that distinguished social groups and assigned value to them, often constructing an imagined “other” as physically odorous and therefore inferior.

Class judgments worked similarly. Ideas about refined noses and refined bodies developed alongside stereotypes of laboring people as both less sensitive to odor and more likely to produce objectionable smells. At the same time, workers in numerous trades relied on highly developed olfactory knowledge as part of their actual expertise.

The supposedly neutral body was never quite neutral.

Hsuan Hsu's The Smell of Risk takes the argument into modern environmental and racial politics. Hsu describes what he calls differential deodorization, in which cleaner and more controlled atmospheres are enjoyed by some populations while industrial pollution, exhaust, pesticides and other unwanted airborne materials are disproportionately experienced by others. He also examines the racialization of odor and artistic attempts to challenge those associations.

This is far beyond the question of which perfume someone chooses in the morning, but it matters to the broader cultural history of fragrance.

Ideas about what a civilized, respectable or desirable person should smell like have never been distributed equally.

Sometimes the most politically significant odor is the one society insists should not be there.

Smell can also preserve identity without functioning as an overt political statement.

Aromatic materials belong to domestic, religious and cultural practices all over the world. Incense, cooking spices, flowers, woods, oils and smoke can become inseparable from place, family and ritual.

When people move, those sensory practices can travel with them.

This should be approached carefully. It is too easy for perfume writing to romanticize Indigenous, religious or diasporic aromatic traditions as reservoirs of mysterious scent knowledge available for commercial inspiration.

Cultural continuity is not a raw-material library.

But scent can be an unusually durable way of retaining a relationship with place. Contemporary research into migration and sensory identity increasingly describes smell as part of how people understand cultural belonging, particularly when identity is distributed across more than one country or community. Recent qualitative work has found participants describing scents as connected to hybrid and shifting cultural identities rather than one simple idea of home.

For perfumery, the useful lesson is restraint.

A material can carry history without a brand claiming ownership over that history.

Sometimes acknowledging where an ingredient, technique or aromatic reference comes from is more meaningful than turning it into mythology.

This is where I would separate natural perfume from the political claims often made on its behalf.

Choosing natural perfume can reflect an interest in botanical materials, traditional extraction, agricultural provenance, variability or the particular sensory complexity of essential oils and absolutes.

It does not automatically constitute ecological resistance.

A plant-derived ingredient can have an exemplary supply chain or a troubling one. Natural materials may be abundant, endangered, farmed, wild-harvested, traceable or almost opaque. Their environmental impact cannot be inferred from the word natural alone.

Likewise, synthetic aroma materials are not evidence of corporate conformity. Many of the most radical developments in twentieth-century perfumery became possible because synthetic chemistry allowed perfumers to create abstractions that had never existed in nature.

The interesting possibility for natural perfume lies elsewhere.

Working closely with identifiable botanical materials can encourage specificity. Which rose? Which extraction? Where did the sandalwood grow? What does this year's patchouli actually smell like?

That attention to material can become an alternative to the increasingly abstract language of “clean woods,” “sensual amber” or “addictive skin.”

But it is an aesthetic and material choice before it is a political one.

Its meaning depends on what the perfumer actually does with it.

The same caution applies to niche fragrance.

“Niche” once suggested smaller distribution, specialized audiences and greater independence from mass-market conventions. The contemporary category is much less tidy. Large luxury companies own important niche houses, globally distributed brands retain the language of exclusivity, and independent perfumers can create fragrances that are either radical or entirely conventional.

The word itself cannot guarantee creative independence.

What niche fragrance has helped normalize is the idea that perfume does not need to begin with broad demographic categories. A fragrance can be made around a peculiar material, a difficult aesthetic idea or a very specific audience and still find its wearer.

That freedom matters.

It allows a tuberose to remain medicinal, a patchouli earthy, a floral indifferent to gender, or a perfume inspired by a cultural reference to remain too strange for universal approval.

None of this overthrows anything.

But it does preserve room for specificity.

In a market that naturally rewards reproducible successes, preserving the right to make something particular is valuable enough without calling every independent bottle an act of rebellion.

Perhaps perfume is most subversive when the gesture is smaller than the rhetoric surrounding it.

A man wears the rose he was told belonged to someone else. A woman prefers smoke and vetiver to the florals marketed to her. Someone changes fragrance during a gender transition because the new scent makes their own body feel more recognizable. Another person continues wearing a supposedly unfashionable perfume because decades of memory have made it impossible to replace.

None requires an audience.

And none becomes meaningful simply because it breaks a rule.

The common element is authorship.

Fragrance culture gives us an enormous number of scripts about what luxury smells like, what masculinity smells like, what youth smells like, what seduction smells like, even what supposedly clean skin smells like.

Those scripts can be pleasurable. Sometimes we genuinely want to inhabit them.

The freedom lies in knowing that they are scripts.

Perfume has been used to signal wealth, seduction, political affiliation, respectability, gender and cultural belonging. It has also been used to disguise, cross or ignore those categories.

The Muscadins remind us that a smell can become politically charged even when the politics is partly caricature. The history of gendered perfume shows that supposedly natural divisions can be remarkably recent. Contemporary research shows that people still use scent deliberately in constructing and affirming identity.

None of this means that choosing an unusual niche fragrance is a revolutionary gesture.

It means something more subtle.

Smell is one of the ways culture reaches the body.

Perfume gives us a small degree of control over what happens when it gets there.

A natural perfume chosen for the particular strangeness of its materials, a familiar cologne worn by an unexpected person, a rose that refuses to behave according to its marketing category: each can create a space between what a scent is supposed to mean and what it comes to mean on an individual body.

Sometimes that space is political.

Sometimes it is simply personal.

The distinction does not make it less important.

Cerulo, K. A. (2018). “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution.” American Sociological Review, 83(2), 361–389. doi:10.1177/0003122418759679. ( journals.sagepub.com)

Classen, C., Howes, D., & Synnott, A. (1994). Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. Routledge.

Easterbrook-Smith, G. (2025). “‘I’ve Adopted It as My Smell’: Transgender Identity and the Olfactory.” The Senses and Society, 49–61. doi:10.1080/17458927.2025.2453326. ( tandfonline.com)

Hsu, H. L. (2020). The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics. NYU Press. ( academic.oup.com)

Lindqvist, A. (2013). “Gender Categorization of Perfumes: The Difference between Odour Perception and Commercial Classification.” NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 21(3), 218–231. doi:10.1080/08038740.2013.820216. ( tandfonline.com)

Perras, J.-A. (2017). “La Réaction parfumée : Les ‘petits musqués’ de la Révolution.” Littérature, 185, 24–38. ( revues.armand-colin.com)

Reinarz, J. (2014). Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. University of Illinois Press. See particularly “Odorous Others: Race and Smell,” “Seduction and Subversion: Gender and Smell,” and “Uncommon Scents: Class and Smell.” ( academic.oup.com)

Tullett, W. (2019). Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense. Oxford University Press. See “Individual Atmospheres: Perfume and Sensory Performances.” ( academic.oup.com)

Cobb, M. (2020). Smell: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. See “Smell in Culture.” ( academic.oup.com)