Be a Leader

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On my somewhat-annual January trip to New York this year, I spent some time at Scent Bar in Nolita, as I am wont to do. As I sniffed my way through a line of rose-based perfumes—I had challenged the SA to make someone who doesn't like rose fragrances like them—a man and his young son came to stand on the left side of me. The boy, a budding fragrance bro, was about 14, I guessed, due to his short stature compared to his father and still rather high speaking voice. He rattled off a list of things he wanted to smell, no doubt because his classmates were all wearing them. It included a couple of Parfums de Marly, Initio, and Xerjoff fragrances, and Essential Parfums Bois Impérial—none of which the store had in stock.

My husband wears Bois Impérial. I understand how young smellmaxxer pups would be interested in that scent. Not only is it incredible, but it's also affordable, and lasts all fuxxing day long and into the morning. I turned to the kid and suggested that he try Orange X Santal by the same line. It's similar enough that I can't easily tell when Mr. Minx is wearing it. The kid gave me the side-eye and continued to peruse the shelves. His father smiled apologetically and suggested to his son that he "listen to the lady. She seems to know what she's talking about." But of course I'm old and female, so can't possibly influence a male child.

I went back to my task, and have no idea what the kid bought or didn't buy. But as the story came back to me this morning as I was planning a future trip to NY, I realized what I should have said to him was: "Be a leader, not a follower."

I understand why he came to Scent Bar. He wasn't there for the same reason I was. I had walked in and essentially said, "I hate rose. Change my mind." He came in knowing exactly what he wanted to smell. Scent Bar carries niche fragrances, and he had a mental shopping list of the niche fragrances that the other boys his age apparently agree are worth wearing. There's nothing wrong with liking what your friends like. Especially when you're 14. But fragrance is such an easy, harmless way to start developing your own taste. If the thing you came in to smell isn't there, smell something else. Smell something you've never heard of. Smell something with an ugly bottle. Smell the $80 fragrance sitting next to the $350 one. If you love something your friends have never heard of, wear the hell out of it. Maybe they'll start wearing it because of you. Be the kid who discovers the next thing, rather than the kid who waits for TikTok to tell him what the next thing is.

I do have to admit that I enjoy the popularity of Jean Paul Gaultier's Le Male among the smellmaxxer set. Little boys apparently see the muscular blue torso and the word MALE and think, "Yes, this is some manly shit." Meanwhile, they're happily dousing themselves in lavender, orange blossom, vanilla, and powder.

Joke's on you, boys. You're wearing a floral.

And really, what else should anyone expect from Jean Paul Gaultier? This is the man who put cones on Madonna's tits. He put men in skirts and played with gender throughout his career. You can't trust Jean Paul Gaultier to put a strapping male torso on a bottle and then deliver some stereotypical idea of MAN SMELL. The joke is practically built into the packaging. Gaultier became Gaultier because he wasn't interested in doing exactly what everyone else was doing. There's a lesson there for the kids spraying his perfume.

So, young smellmaxxers: smell your Parfums de Marly. Smell your Initio and Xerjoff. Wear Le Male and discover that flowers aren't going to revoke your man card. But while you're in a store containing hundreds of fragrances, many of which you've never heard of, smell some of those, too. Develop your own nose. Figure out what you like.

Be a leader, not a follower.

In other words, if you absolutely must join a cult, be the damn leader.

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Posted by theminx on Minxstinks
Note: this post is my opinion. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post or any other companies.

Perfume Is Not “the New Smoking”

"Perfume is the new smoking" is the sort of phrase designed to travel faster than the evidence behind it. It is meant to convey an alarming idea: something once considered sophisticated and socially acceptable is revealed to be dangerous, inconsiderate, and destined for public rejection. It is also a deeply misleading comparison. This does not mean that fragrance is harmless; it can cause allergic contact dermatitis and trigger respiratory symptoms, headaches, or nausea in sensitive individuals. Heavily scented products can make shared spaces difficult for people with asthma and other health conditions. The FDA acknowledges both skin and respiratory reactions to fragrance ingredients, while the American Academy of Dermatology identifies fragrance as one of the most common causes of allergic contact dermatitis.

Those are legitimate concerns, but they do not make perfume comparable to tobacco.

Cigarette smoking is addictive and has been conclusively established as a direct cause of cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and premature death. Tobacco smoke contains thousands of chemicals, including numerous known carcinogens. Exposure harms not only smokers but also the people around them; secondhand smoke has no risk-free level of exposure. These conclusions rest on decades of evidence. According to the National Cancer Institute, tobacco use remains the leading preventable cause of cancer and cancer deaths.

However, no comparable body of evidence demonstrates that ordinary use of fine fragrance causes population-wide disease or mortality on anything approaching that scale. Perfume is not addictive in the pharmacological sense. Wearing it does not expose bystanders to combustion products. Nor is there evidence that applying perfume to the neck uniquely damages the thyroid or causes cancer because of the organ’s proximity to the application site.

Calling perfume "the new smoking" substitutes analogy for evidence.

Much of the current alarm around fragrance relies on a basic confusion between hazard and risk. A substance may be capable of causing harm under some circumstances, at some concentration, or by some route of exposure. That is a hazard. Risk asks a different question: how likely is that harm under the conditions in which people are actually exposed? This distinction matters because modern analytical equipment can detect substances at extraordinarily low levels. Finding a chemical associated with a health hazard does not, by itself, establish that a product contains enough of it to cause harm through normal use.

A recent peer-reviewed analysis of 113 personal-care and cleaning products found that 98 percent contained at least one chemical not disclosed on the label, and 85 percent contained an undisclosed chemical with a known or suspected hazard. Those findings deserve attention and point to deficiencies in ingredient disclosure, supply-chain controls, and finished-product testing. But the study did not establish that the detected substances caused illness at the concentrations found. Its product categories included such items as shampoo, lotion, deodorant, sunscreen, baby products, essential oils, and household cleaners; it was not a study of fine fragrance as a category. Some undeclared chemicals may have entered products through contaminated raw materials, manufacturing processes, chemical reactions, or packaging rather than intentional concealment. The appropriate conclusion is that product transparency and testing need improvement, not that a bottle of perfume is equivalent to a pack of cigarettes.

However, the industry cannot dismiss these fears as mere internet hysteria while continuing to rely on opacity. In the United States, individual components of a fragrance formula generally do not have to be listed on a cosmetic label. They may be covered collectively by "fragrance" or "parfum." This can prevent consumers from determining whether a fragrance contains ingredients such as diethyl phthalate, or DEP. The FDA currently states that it has no safety concerns about DEP as used in cosmetics and fragrances and no evidence that phthalates in their present cosmetic uses pose a safety risk. That is more reassuring than viral claims suggest, but it does not eliminate the consumer’s reasonable interest in knowing what a product contains. Trade-secret protection may be commercially understandable, but it creates an information vacuum. Into that vacuum come sweeping claims about "toxins," endocrine disruption, and cancer. The industry’s traditional response, essentially, "trust us, the formula is proprietary," is no longer sufficient for many consumers. Greater disclosure, stronger supply-chain oversight, and more finished-product testing would make exaggerated accusations less persuasive. So would clearer explanations of exposure, concentration, and the safety restrictions already applied to fragrance materials.

The backlash has also created a profitable market for brands promising "clean," "non-toxic," or "chemical-free" fragrance. Such language often generates more confusion than clarity. Everything in perfume, including water, essential oils, and botanical extracts, consists of chemicals. Natural origin does not guarantee safety, and synthetic origin does not establish danger. The FDA specifically cautions that plant-derived ingredients can be irritating or allergenic, even toxic. Some citrus oils, for example, can cause adverse skin reactions when followed by sun exposure.

"Clean" frequently functions as a marketing position rather than a consistently defined safety standard. A brand may exclude a selected list of ingredients without demonstrating that its alternatives are safer. Fear of conventional fragrance can therefore become a sales tool for products that remain fragranced and may contain many of the same classes of allergens. Consumers deserve specific information, like which substances were excluded and why, what replaced them, and what evidence supports the claimed benefit. 

Rejecting the smoking analogy should not become an excuse for disregarding other people’s symptoms. A fragrance may be safe for most users and still cause a serious reaction in a particular person. Offices, medical settings, schools, theaters, and public transportation are shared environments, and applying perfume heavily, or spraying it in a communal space, can impose an avoidable burden on others. Reasonable fragrance etiquette is not an admission that perfume is poisonous; it is recognition that scent travels and that individual tolerances differ. Wearing less fragrance in close quarters and respecting fragrance-free policies are courtesies everyone can afford. 

The choice is not between declaring perfume toxic and insisting that it is perfectly harmless. Neither position reflects the evidence. A responsible discussion should distinguish allergic and sensory reactions from systemic toxicity, and distinguish the presence of a chemical from a meaningful dose. It should also distinguish genuine shortcomings in regulation and disclosure from unsupported claims that perfume causes cancer when sprayed near a particular organ. Perfume is a complex cosmetic product. It should be manufactured responsibly, regulated intelligently, labeled as transparently as practical, and worn with consideration for others. Its ingredients and health effects should continue to be studied.

But "the new smoking" is not a scientific assessment. It is a slogan, and one that takes real but limited concerns and inflates them into a false equivalence. That may be effective content marketing. It is not an effective way to communicate risk.

Reference: Jenna Hua et al., “Hidden Hazards: Nontargeted Chemical Analysis Reveals Widespread Contaminants and Mislabeling in Personal Care and Cleaning Products,” Environment & Health, August 11, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1021/envhealth.6c00181

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Posted by theminx on Minxstinks

Note: this post is my opinion. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post or any other companies.

Scenting a Book Fair, Part 3

Lycoctonum: The Descent Into Madness

When I began trying to recreate Queen of Dreams from Savage Gourmand and Lycoctonum from Killer Sillage for an upcoming book fair, I was convinced the pastry fragrance would be the difficult one. I was wrong.

Unlike Queen of Dreams, which had to evoke a very specific real-world smell, Lycoctonum wasn't based on any existing perfume. I had invented it. I wanted it to smell like dark roses, damp green things, leather, and shadows. Elegant, maybe a little dangerous. Surely, I thought, someone in the niche fragrance world must have already created something close? After all, perfumers have been making dark rose chypres for decades.

How hard could it be to find something already existing that I could alter a tad? 

Reader, it turns out I am incredibly picky. The search quickly became less about finding one perfect perfume and more about assembling a cast of supporting actors. Every day my desk disappeared beneath a fresh crop of blotters. Most days, I found myself muttering things that would have sounded completely unhinged to anyone outside the fragrance or murder mystery-writing communities. "Too pretty." "Not enough leather." "Too much tobacco." "This one isn't poisonous enough." (Seriously, I said that more than once.)

The poor perfumes themselves had done nothing wrong. Some were beautiful. Guerlain's Rose Barbare was richer than I remembered. Serge Lutens' La Fille de Berlin was dramatic but ultimately too elegant. Diptyque's Eau Capitale was wonderful, but far too civilized. Others leaned too fruity, too powdery, or softened into vanilla-adjacent just when I wanted them to remain thorny and cold. 

Instead of searching for a single answer, I began layering. A green perfume here. A leather fragrance there. A dark rose on top. Then another dark rose. Then perhaps a different leather. I tried combinations involving Andrea Maack's Coven, Commodity Moss, J-Scent Black Leather, Frapin Nevermore, Matiere Premiere Radical Rose and Falcon Leather, Carine Roitfeld Kar-Wai, Marc-Antoine Barrois Ganymede, Rose Barbare, Bougie Bougees Quir, L'Artisan Arcana Rosa, and more than a few fragrances I've already forgotten. 

Some combinations came tantalizingly close. One smelled wonderfully strange, but wasn't rosy enough. Another had exactly the right leather, until the drydown became soft and vanillic. One beautiful blend gradually transformed into expensive soap. (I rather liked that one for myself to wear.) Several became, as I repeatedly informed my increasingly patient husband, "too pretty." That turned out to be the problem. Real perfumes, even unusual ones, generally want to be wearable. They are designed to be beautiful, intriguing, comforting, or seductive. Lycoctonum isn't. It's the signature fragrance named after a poisonous plant (wolfsbane) and containing an accord meant to evoke another poisonous plant. It isn't supposed to smell conventionally attractive. It should make you lean in, admire it... and perhaps wonder whether getting quite that close was a mistake.

Somewhere during this process, I realized I had been chasing something that may not actually exist. I realized I was actually searching for a feeling, not just a fragrance. Fortunately, I didn't need to bottle Lycoctonum, I only need to suggest it. Eventually, I stopped looking for perfection and started looking for character.

After countless experiments, I settled on a blend of Piguet Bandit, Byredo Rose Noir, and Guerlain Rose Barbare, decanted together from tiny 1ml samples into a slightly bigger 5 ml spray bottle. To help it last longer, after spraying this concoction on my blotters, I coated it with a layer of Demeter Dark Rose perfume oil, to make it last longer on the paper. Was it the Lycoctonum I'd imagined while writing Killer Sillage? No. The perfume in my head is darker. Stranger. But nobody else could smell what I perceived in my mind's nose, so there was no need to replicate it exactly. Clearly I wasn't able to do that. What I wanted to do was to make something that was good enough.

It seemed successful enough. Browsers at the book fair sniffed thoughtfully, most saying, "ooh, I like that," though some just declared it "nice." It clearly wasn't anything they had ever smelled before. And perhaps that's all Lycoctonum ever needed to be. Not an exact recreation of the perfume that existed in my imagination. Just something distinctive enough that, after reading the novel, a reader might think: "Yes. I can imagine Guillermo Flares creating this."

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Posted by theminx on Minxstinks
Note: this post is my opinion. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post or any other companies.

Scenting a Book Fair, Part 2

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Queen of Dreams: The Pastry Problem

At first, I thought creating a scent inspired by Savage Gourmand would be the harder challenge. After all, Killer Sillage revolves around Lycoctonum, a fictional perfume composed of dark roses, damp green things, and leather. Surely the fragrance world already contained at least one dramatic, vaguely poisonous rose chypre I could point to and say, “There. That’s close enough.”

Meanwhile, Savage Gourmand features a recurring fragrance called Queen of Dreams, a scent inspired by kouign-amann, the caramelized Breton pastry made from extra buttery, laminated yeast dough and sugar. While modern perfumery is absolutely drowning in gourmands at the moment, most of them smell less like actual pastry and more like cupcakes. Also marshmallows, frosting, and straight-up sugar. Sometimes a sweet coffee drink. Rarely, if ever, bread.

What I needed was something that smelled of yeast. Kouign-amann is not merely sweet. It is caramelized and deeply buttery, yes, but also almost savory around the edges, with crisp browned layers and a distinct suggestion of bread beneath all the sugar. This sent me on a quest involving many orders of perfume decants, leading to an alarming number of blotters scattered across my desk.

I thought I had a breakthrough when I found a couple of Etsy sellers offering pastry-scented perfumes. I ordered several samples from one, and while they all had the right vibe and appropriate yeasty notes, they also smelled very... inexpensive. There's a note like wet cardboard in low-quality perfumery ingredients that I cannot not smell, and it ruins things for me. Yet, when I saw another seller's fragrance called simply, Butter Croissant, I ordered it anyway. And it was... perfect. At least as far as the bread component is concerned. It smelled of salted butter and yeast, not exactly like a croissant, but close enough. Much like grape soda doesn't taste of actual grapes, but we still recognize it as such. (And no wet cardboard!)

Another fragrance called Asian Bakery, by a company called Mochiglow, instantly transported me into the bakeries I haunt in my adopted home-away-from-home, Manhattan's Koreatown: warm milk bread, lightly sweet dough, tender pastries. Not super sweet, and thankfully not artificial. Just... bread. Beautiful bread. (Personally, I love bread so much I would marry it if I wasn't already married.) 

Butter Croissant layered with Asian Bakery fulfilled the essential bready aspect of kouign-amann. But I still needed a subtle sweet note. Something caramelized. 

Suzy Nightingale of the On the Scent podcast had suggested that I look into Demeter Pretzel, which honestly was almost perfect on its own. But I really wanted additional yeasty notes that it was lacking. It also has the vaguest cinnamon sugar vibe that's not quite right. When I placed that order, I also added their Sticky Toffee Pudding. That was a flash of genius on my part, as it turned out to be the missing piece of the puzzle that added the proper caramelized sweetness to my buttery pastry base. Since Demeter fragrances have the longevity of a fart in a windstorm, I ordered the oil formulation, which serves to anchor the concoction to my paper blotters and makes the scent last quite a long time. Weeks, actually.

Suddenly, there it was.

Not a literal kouign-amann, perhaps. No perfume can truly replicate the experience of standing in a bakery and taking a big bite out of a flaky pastry. But close enough that someone picking up a blotter at a book fair might immediately think: “Wow. That smells delicious.”

Which, frankly, is exactly the reaction I am hoping for.

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Posted by theminx on Minxstinks
Note: this post is my opinion. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post or any other companies.