Synthetic v natural is always a hot topic for debate on New York’s most vocal male discussion forums. But rather than the merits of the latest Sports Illustrated model, cologne is the subject getting one particular bunch of dudes hot under the collar. Describing themselves as the Goodsmellas, the 160-odd (mainly straight) members of the Facebook group Peace Love Perfume are passionate about scent — and they’re not afraid to come out and say so. After all, with Brad Pitt as the latest face of Chanel No 5 (yes, the classic women’s scent), fine fragrance is shaping up to be the new frontier of male vanity.
Barney Bishop, a PR professional who is also into DJing and blogs about male scent on Fragrant Moments, is prepared to go on the record and admit it: “Yes, I spray my bed sheets.” Actively pursuing what he calls “a scented life”, Bishop is one of the Goodsmellas who have come to meet me at their unofficial HQ, MiN New York, a niche fragrance apothecary in SoHo. These are no fey metrosexual types — the owner, Chad Murawczyk (a fragrance fiend and Mark Ronson/Harrison Ford cross), could probably bottle the testosterone in here and sell it, too.
For most of them, the seeds of their obsession were sown at high school. Carlos Powell, a Brooklyn shoe manufacturer and the founder of Peace Love Perfume, remembers wearing Pierre Cardin as a teenager, but describes discovering Tom Ford’s Private Blend as his “down-the-rabbit-hole moment”. He has gone on to amass a collection of 200 bottles and 450 “decants” (PLP members will often host “splits”, where several guys go in on an expensive bottle and decant the “juice” into multiple phials). He rolls his eyes: “There are bottles everywhere in my apartment, but kept neat. Hey, does anybody else keep spreadsheets on their inventory?”
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There is definitely a geeky element to all of this. Bishop describes discovering a new scent that really speaks to him as a high akin to bringing home a piece of rare vinyl. The more obscure and niche one’s collection, the better. When Murawczyk reels off a list of his current favourite scents, he might as well be speaking a different language: “Keiko Mecheri’s Bespoke Canyon Dreams, Xerjoff’s Mefisto, Miller Harris’s Feuilles de Tabac...” At this point, Mindy Yang, his girlfriend and MiN’s vice-president, interjects: “And today he wore Richwood.” Cue gasps from the table. Coming in at £425 a bottle, it’s the fragrance equivalent of rocking up to a party in a vintage Mustang.
It’s hard to imagine a British bloke blowing a week’s wages on a bottle of squirt. But Liberty’s beauty room says: “We have definitely seen a rise in demand for men’s fragrances in the past two years. Men are really catching up with women in their demand for niche, signature scents.”
The teen dream Oritsé Williams from JLS has admitted he is a scent addict through and through — and owns 70 aftershaves. “I love my perfumes: they make me feel fresh,” he says. The designer Antonio Berardi wears one cologne on his face and another on his neck “for the element of surprise”. He also creates a unique scent by layering exotics such as Guerlain’s Du Coq and Mouchoir de Monsieur with Vétiver Extraordinaire by Frédéric Malle.
Male grooming is also the topic of Morgan Spurlock’s latest documentary, Mansome, which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. Off the back of reports that sales of men’s toiletries in America are set to hit $2.56 billion (£1.63 billion) this year, Spurlock asks: “If women are the breadwinners now, and I’m being told I need to change the way I live to please my woman, then what makes us men?”
Roja Dove, a fragrance expert, believes that, for most British men, scent is “sadly, a tool to pull”, but the Goodsmellas insist this is not the case. Bishop is currently going through a “trad” phase in honour of his dad. It was eyeing up the “Grey Flannel and Polo in the green bottle” on his father’s dressing table that meant he grew up thinking of fragrance as “one of the details of being a man”.
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None of the Goodsmellas is averse to wearing women’s fragrance, with Powell, who resisted it at first, admitting that he gets the most compliments when he spritzes with Poison, Dior Addict or Fracas: “If I wear a manly fragrance, girls say I smell like their dad.” Bishop remembers falling in love with Gaultier’s first (female) fragrance as a teenager, “but I hid it when all my boys came over”, and more recently Tom Ford’s Black Orchid (“My all-time favourite!” says Powell), which he thought was a man’s scent until he saw the advertising online.
Andrew Buck, meanwhile, a consultant from Philadelphia who has a blog called Scenterest and owns upwards of 150 bottles of perfume, says he and his wife share scents: “She has my decants of Tom Ford’s Arabian Wood and I can’t get them back.” (Ford is obviously the fragrance don in the Goodsmellas’ eyes.)
Murawczyk insists that “the gendering of fragrance is really just a marketing tool”, while Dove thinks that Chanel choosing Pitt as the new face of No 5 is “a very positive move towards men’s liberation”. Liberation from the cloying clutches of a bottle of Lynx, that is. Next up, the production company Relativity Media is said to be searching for “the Indiana Jones” of the fragrance world, to star in a new reality show based on the unearthing of exotic ingredients. It approached Erwin Creed, the dashing scion of the 252-year-old brand, for the job, but he declined. Clearing the path for one of the Goodsmellas, perhaps?
Murawczyk steps in with the final word on the subject: “What’s great is that this conversation is going more mainstream. We’re not crazy, we’re not eccentric. If anything, we’re a bit more evolved.”