My perfume smells like sex and I can’t stop wearing it

I’m not sure if this outs me as a perv but, in my mind, perfume equals sex. I don’t explicitly mean the act itself, but more that fragrance and the olfactory intimacy it elicits seems intertwined with things of a sexual, sensual nature. If music be the food of love, scent is the foreplay. There are very few interactions as sexy to me as someone leaning in to smell a perfume on your neck, or the delight and immediate rapport that comes from recognising a familiar scent when you hug a stranger.

Scent is arguably the most animalistic of the senses. There is something about it that bypasses the respectability of good taste, airs or graces. Though it has come to be seen as a prestigious high art form, there still remains an element of the ancient and primitive – it transcends our full knowledge. Apparently this is because olfactory information does not need to be integrated in the thalamus prior to processing in the cortex, meaning scent quite literally surpasses conscious mental processing, permeating parts of ourselves beyond our full control. This is one of the reasons smells can be hard to describe in words but can evoke memories we didn’t even know we had. Anyone who has caught a whiff of a long lost lover on a passing stranger in the street can attest to that.

I find myself increasingly fascinated by perfume, and what I want to smell like is sex. I’m not the first to desire this. French perfumer Jacques Guerlain once said that perfumes should smell of “the underside of my mistress”. The original formulas of the scents Guerlain created – such as Jicky (1889) and Shalimar (1925) – are the stuff of legend and were tinged with vaginal and anal smells. When creating Black Orchid, Tom Ford apparently told Estée Lauder perfume executives that he wanted it to smell like “a man’s crotch”.

Love and sex have never been very measured or predictable things for me. Perhaps it’s my Scorpio stellium but every time I’ve fallen head over heels in lust with someone it’s been more of a locking eyes across a dance floor and wanting to rip their clothes off and ruin their life kind of thing, as opposed to swiping right and going on three nice dates before plucking up the courage for some awkward lights-off sex after getting tipsy on a cheap Sav Blanc. My search for the perfect sexy perfume was equally unpredictable.

At first I tried going with the safe, obvious choice. Tom Ford is a brand built on sex and the perfumes are no different. His first men’s scent adverts were banned for showing the perfume bottle placed between a heavily oiled woman’s thighs and breasts, naked but for a perfect red manicure. On TikTok women were raving about Tom Ford perfume, with claims including being complimented countless times a day to being stopped outright in the street. Despite the eye watering price points and stripper-adjacent names (Jasmin Rouge, Vanille Fatale or Electric Cherry), however, I didn’t find any of these hit the spot. Sexy maybe, but sex? None were giving “I just fucked” to me – more “you smell like a baby prostitute”.

Good sex, like really good sex, is gross. The intimate, unfettered workings on the naked human body are not cute or manicured, and neither are our innermost desires and deviances. The other thing that makes sex really good is the lingering, the longing, the unquenchable desire for more. So, after an unsuccessful experiment with “skin scents” (PHLUR’s Missing Person, Molecule 01 etc) – I found them to be more laced with nostalgia and longing than lust, plus there’s something inherently un-sexy about a scent being so heavily engineered to make you smell human – it was time to turn to the expert in scent and sensuality, Scout Dixon West.

Not only is Scout my enduring through-the-screen crush, but she is also an expert in niche perfumes, giving recommendations for perfumes that evoke everything from depression spirals and deadbeat dads to sweet decay. So when Scout described the perfumes of Marlou as “so skanky, so lascivious, so salacious” and being inspired by human flesh and intimacy, I knew I was on the right track.

At first I wasn’t convinced entirely by Marlou, but as I experimented with wearing each of the four scents I became completely obsessed with them. Each of the brand’s perfumes has its own distinct personality but sits on top of a base note that I can only describe as coital. Coital, animalic and somewhat gross. I became so addicted to the psychologically bewitching smells that I’ve taken carrying around the tester bottle of whatever one I’m wearing in my bag and reapplying it, tentatively raising my wrist to my nose throughout my day or night to sneak another sniff. I haven’t taken off Corpalium for the past week; the soil-like woody iris evokes a ferality that makes me think of digging nails into a forest floor. Carnicure creates a saliva quality with powdery violet, orange, whipped cream and musk, and Poudrextase evokes a saccharine intimacy with girly rose and sweet animatic notes – apt for a word meaning “powdered ecstasy.”

After all this, did I find the smell of sex? I wanted something unbridled, heady and completely intoxicating; the most beautiful and disgustingly delicious combination of lust, passion and danger. I finally arrived at Ambilux, the last of the Marlou perfumes. Scout described it as “a ballerina’s dirty tights”. Fragrantica reviews of the smell range from “the pink tiled bathroom of my Nana” to “dirty panties, sex, and piss”. To me, it smells like honey poured over burnt toast, rotting rubbish in summer and the feeling of being so infatuated with someone that you don’t even think about their morning breath before you pick up where you left off the night before. Ambilux is my answer to the smell of sex. I can’t stop wearing it. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart, but neither am I. Marlou, if you’re reading this, please send me more because I’ve already run out.

This article was originally published 30 April 2024.