Pour Homme, Pour Femme

It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time, way before some marketing whiz-kid came up with the word aftershave and before fragrances were labelled ‘pour homme’ and ‘pour femme’, where scents were essentially genderless.

Certainly, in Victorian times men wouldn’t have had a problem with wearing overtly floral fragrances and the old-fashioned products still sold in some traditional barbers, scented as they are with rose and lavender, are evidence of a time when men were led by their noses rather than by marketing spiel.

Think of it this way: if you restrict yourself to only wearing fragrances earmarked as being for men then you’re limiting the field and closing the door on some very interesting fragrances indeed. Sure, it takes guts to carry off some of the scents listed below but if you’re a confident character who likes to think for himself and is comfortable in his own skin, you’ll have no problem at all.

So why not give one or two of them a whirl?

Burberry For Women Eau de Parfum

“Yes it sounds like a woman’s perfume from the name but this sleeper hit could easily be mistaken for a man’s eau de parfum,” says Liam Moore, founder and editor of ODOU, a magazine dedicated to fragrance.

“The intense fizzy, fruity jasmine can sit unashamedly sophisticatedly on the right man. After all, Dior Homme is nothing but a straight-up iris-based fragrance, so give jasmine a chance here and wear it with a crisp white shirt.”

Guerlain Jicky

Reputed to be a favourite fragrance of Sean Connery (and they don’t come much butcher than Bond) this legendary perfume, launched back in 1889, is credited with being the first significant fragrance of the modern age.

It started out popular with men, then became popular with women, eventually establishing itself as a bona fide women’s fragrance. A member of perfume site basenotes.com describes it as “flowery, animalistic… like a cat having a poop in a lavender bush.” Which is quite possibly one of my favorite fragrance reviews ever.