How to smell like sex

We like reading books about sex, watching TV shows about sex, and sometimes, occasionally, every so often having sex, but would you choose to smell of sex? Because it’s happening.

One fragrance, by the perfume house Jouissance, is a warm, sensual, spicy homage to the patron saint of erotica Anaïs Nin (it’s called, appropriately, Les Cahiers Secrets). Another scent, En Plein Air, uses earthy, citrussy tones to evoke images of “grass imprints on bare skin, underwear in hand,” says Jouissance’s founder, Cherry Cheng. All of Cheng’s perfumes are inspired by her love of female-authored erotic literature, which she reads in bed. “The atmosphere of these works is so vivid,” she says, “they almost have a scent of their own. These writers articulated aspects of the female condition I felt intensely but couldn’t yet verbalise.”

On the less literary, more literal end of the olfactory spectrum, Blindfold by L’Objet channels BDSM via animalic base notes (mimicking skin, fur and secretions), layered with milk and tobacco. And Vyrao’s Ludatrix is an “eau du parfum for passion and arousal” with hints of lipstick and latex.

Where does Cheng feel this trend comes from? “We’re living in an era of surface-level provocation,” she says. “Sex becomes shorthand for instant gratification, but true intimacy is layered. Scent, like language, unfolds slowly and expresses what is often unsaid: desire, contradiction, vulnerability, power.”