Do You Smell Like a Feminist? Fragrance Choices Explored evoke feelings, and many of us associate certain scents with particular genders. Historically, perfumes have been categorized and marketed according to gender norms; masculine fragrances often evoked feelings of strength and power, while feminine perfumes were associated with femininity and elegance. But as society continues to shift and evolve, the lines that once separated masculine and feminine fragrances are starting to blur.

Breaking the Scent Ceiling: Exploring Fragrance Choices Through a Feminist Lens

The popularity of unisex fragrances reflects the growing desire to defy gender stereotypes and show that women can be just as powerful and dominant as men. While this may seem to be a small gesture in the face of gendered marketing and advertising, it is an important step towards empowering female consumers who are tired of being marketed fragrances that portray femininity as weak, submissive, and unable to stand up for themselves.

Several of the most popular fragrances in recent years encapsulate the girlboss mentality that dominated millennial career women, glorifying a rigid corporate grind and a flippant attitude toward sex. While the ad campaigns featuring the stereotypically beautiful, hetero-normative model are certainly effective in promoting these brands, it is hard to see how they challenge gender norms in any meaningful way when their product names and descriptions include “girlpower,” “mutiny,” and “girls just want to have fun.”

In Experiment 2, we predicted that a fragrance’s olfactory characteristics and the grammatical gender of its description would influence participants’ recognition scores and their memory for the fragrance. We found that the same pattern was present, as in Experiment 1, with a higher recognition score for the fragrance when its olfactory characteristics and the grammatically gendered description were congruent.…