Perfume didn’t have a gender for most of its 5,000-year history.
Egyptian priests burned kyphi without caring who was in the room, and Renaissance nobles drenched themselves in ambergris and musk because nobody had drawn that line yet. That’s all very recent.
The ‘for him’ and ‘for her’ aisle most of us grew up with is a modern retail invention, and the fashion houses that made money from it have already started to pull the whole thing apart from the inside. So how did we end up with gendered perfume, and what changes when those labels come off for good?
How Perfume Got a Gender
Back in the early-to-mid 20th century, department stores needed a system for their expanding fragrance counters. Splitting by gender made browsing quicker while giving brands an excuse to sell two versions of everything, so the format became standard across nearly every major retailer within a couple of decades. That’s the whole origin story. The decision had everything to do with shelf logistics and nothing at all to do with how perfume actually works.
Nothing about rose is inherently feminine, and cedar has never been inherently masculine. The split was pure marketing. But it narrowed people’s choices for decades, doing real damage to how anyone explored scent. A man drawn to sweet, floral notes wouldn’t find them on his side of the counter, and a woman who preferred something dry and resinous had to wander over to the men’s section and put up with the raised eyebrow from a sales assistant who assumed she was lost.
The Houses That Walked It Back
Niche brands got there first. Le Labo launched in 2006 without a single gendered label in its range, and Byredo’s founder Ben Gorham publicly rejected the idea that a scent should come packaged with a target demographic attached to it. Maison Margiela’s ‘Replica’ line organises fragrances around memories and places, with zero mention of who’s “supposed” to wear any of them.
What matters more now is that the big designer houses have caught up. Gucci’s recent launches have gone genderless. Tom Ford crossed that line a long time ago and hasn’t looked back since. Even heritage names like Guerlain have started releasing fragrances outside the old ‘pour homme’ and ‘pour femme’ categories, which would’ve been unthinkable a decade ago.
The way fragrances get catalogued is changing along with it. The brand directory at scentverdict.com, for example, groups houses as designer, niche and independent, Arabian and British, and every fragrance page leads with its notes.
How to Shop by Nose, Not by Label
Ignore the section headers entirely. Walk past the ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ signs and head straight for the testers, because nobody at the fragrance counter will check your ID or ask why you’re sniffing from the wrong shelf. Think in terms of note families instead: do you lean towards citrus and green notes, warm orientals, florals, woods, or something aquatic?
Also, “unisex” doesn’t mean “neutral,” which trips a lot of people up. The range is enormous. Some genderless fragrances are bold enough to fill a room, while others are so light they’ll barely register on the skin after half an hour, and you really won’t know where a fragrance lands on that spectrum until you try it. All the word actually tells you is that the brand won’t dictate who wears it.
The Only Question That Ever Mattered
Genderless fragrance isn’t a trend that will fade in a couple of seasons. Perfume worked this way for thousands of years before a mid-century retail model carved it into two halves, and the correction has been building for long enough now that the old format is starting to look like the anomaly it always was.
This evolution will change how people discover scent entirely. When the labels come off, you stop filtering out half the counter before you’ve even started, and bottles you’d never have picked up suddenly become fair game. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds. Someone who spent years buying from the same three ‘for him’ options might find that the fragrance they’ve been looking for was sitting two shelves over the whole time, filed under a category that had nothing to do with them. The only question that ever mattered is do you like how it smells on your skin?, and the industry is finally getting out of the way of that answer.
