perfume

Kinksters talk a lot about headspace: subspace, topspace, dom space, little space, these nebulous moods which result from enacting our deepest desires and also help us enact them better. The way vanilla people talk about arousal or erection or lubrication is also the way kinksters talk about their various headspaces: as a state both desirable and potentially elusive, sometimes spontaneous and sometimes hard-won, and usually best to capitalize on when the mood happens to strike.

Personally, I use many different tools to get into the kinky headspaces I enjoy: sadomasochism, hypnosis, certain sex acts, certain clothing and hairstyles. Scent is one of these tools for me. Once applied, it permeates whatever happens next on a level so subtle yet total that it can’t help but affect the proceedings. The right fragrance can shift your entire mood, the way you carry yourself, the way you view yourself. Here are 5 scents that evoke 5 different kinky dispositions…

“Cuir” by Mona di Orio

What to say about this spicy, carnal leather scent? Fragrantica calls it “ruthlessly chic.” Rachel Syme calls it “leather at its most pure and therefore most dirty.” C. Murphy says it makes them feel “irresistibly seductive” and like they want to “fuck [themself] and rip someone’s head off.”

I don’t resonate much with the notion of a “femdom,” the way that keyword plays out in mainstream porn and the kinky corners of Tumblr. When I take on a dominant role – which is rare to begin with – I don’t deck myself out in bust-emphasizing corsets or treacherous stilettos. I don’t glare menacingly or call anyone a maggot, a pathetic loser, or my bitch. I don’t pace with purpose, wielding a whip.

My dominance is softer, smaller, more a compelling coo than a harrowing howl. But this Mona di Orio scent is the olfactory embodiment of that towering femdom, and so maybe I could anoint myself with it to bring forth a little bossy flair.

The scent isn’t sweet or forgiving, like some fragrances which soften their leathers with vanilla or warm spices. It’s sharpened to a point with rough-and-tumble anise, cardamom, and juniper. It’s the quirk of an eyebrow with no hint of a smile. It’s the dominant persona I will never melt into, but secretly wish I could try on for a day.

“Dark Purple” by Montale (content note for DD/lg / ageplay in this one)

What would the “little girl” of DD/lg fantasies wear, if she wore perfume? It’s easy to say she would choose something over-the-top sexy and feminine (like “Good Girl,” below), but to me, that rings hollow. My inner babygirl isn’t a lithe adult in precise pigtails; she’s an emotionally messy 13-year-old (or thereabouts) who craves cosmopolitan adulthood while still clinging to the comforts of youth. She would, therefore, wear a gourmand. I think she would wear Montale’s “Dark Purple.”

When you imagine this scent, imagine dark purple lollipops, dark purple flowers braided into strawberry-blonde hair, a hint of grape cough medicine or honey whiskey or both. It’s a sticky, syrupy scent that oozes unsophisticated sweetness – like a little girl before she knows the power of being a woman. Plum, orange, rose, geranium, and ambergris combine to create something as rich and saccharine as raspberry coulis spilling off a slice of cheesecake. This, I imagine, is what Lolita would wear if she wore perfume – and it would make Humbert sick to his stomach and haunt his carnal dreams.

“Body Scent” by Leatherstock

On an episode of Why Are People Into That?, artist and award-winning bootblack KD Diamond tells a tale from her perverted youth. She describes sating her burgeoning leather fetish as a child by relentlessly sniffing an Italian leather glove. She would even sleep with it near her nose so she would never have to stop smelling it. Now that’s dedication.

While I don’t have a leather fetish, I nonetheless relate to this story. Some scents really are that good, and for me, leather is one of them. I bought a rollerball of Leatherstock Body Scent while on a kinky road trip with friends: we spent an afternoon at the Leather Archives in Chicago, and later dropped by the Leather & Latte café in Minneapolis. The scent of Leatherstock, while it really is almost identical to your standard leather smell, always reminds me with such specificity of those places: the solemn stained-glass art, the heavy books of Tom of Finland illustrations, the casually-clad kinksters clutching coffee cups, the dim dusty basement filled with ominous mannequins. I spent much of that trip wearing Leatherstock and my first collar, so leather was close to me both literally and figuratively for the trip’s entire duration. It was a comfort and a constant, as I’m sure it is for many leather fetishists.

Leatherstock is for when you want to smell, as literally as possible, like leather. Like kneeling and pressing your face to a master’s boots, or faceplanting prayer-like against your own cuffed wrists during a hard spanking, or secretly wrapping yourself in a mystery guest’s motorcycle jacket in the coat room at a party. In the Dry Down, Rachel Syme writes about how our modern understanding of leather’s scent is really just perfumers’ attempts to cover up the reek of the “bloody, gut-strewn tanneries of 16th-century France” with something more palatable. So to me, it’s a scent that carries that weight, that history, and also the weight and history of queer kinky culture. Leather daddies, drag queens, well-worn chaps, a trusty flogger. I can keep all that near my nose when I wear the right jacket, the right collar, or Leatherstock.

“Good Girl” by Carolina Herrera

This is the trashiest perfume I own, and I mean that affectionately. It just smells like the fragrance you would reach for if you were also rocking a Juicy tracksuit and a blonde blowout and basically saying “fuck you” to whatever bullshit the patriarchy tends to whisper about all of that.

I bought it for its name – I am a good girl, after all – but it actually doesn’t strike me as a “good” or innocent or pristine scent at all. It’s reckless, messy, slutty. I don’t wear it a lot, because it doesn’t feel like “me,” but it’s grown on me, in its own weird way.

There can be a certain kind of power, in a heteropatriarchal world, to reclaiming tropes long used to tamp your people down. Some women get called ditzy, bitchy, dramatic. They’re accused of being “dumb blondes,” cockteases, sluts. “Good Girl” smells like a woman who decided to stop giving a shit about all that and just live her life – even, and perhaps especially, if that means laughing “too loud,” speaking “out of turn,” and blowing hot-pink bubblegum bubbles with hot-pink glossy lips.

Wearing this scent makes me want to embrace my inner trashy trollop, my inner ballbusting shrew, my inner bad girl, whatever the hell any of that means. Lots of people find “bimbos” hot; lots of people find it hot to be a “bimbo.” I don’t want the world to treat me like a silly slut, but I do enjoy feeling like one from time to time – even just for the duration of a rough blowjob.

“Sir” by D.S. & Durga

It is always limiting to suppose that submissives or dominants have to look or act a certain way to be valid in those identities. When I think of my own insecurities as a submissive, I think immediately of Creepy Yeha and pigtail-clad Tumblr babygirls: shapely waifs strapped tight into pastel leather gear, pouting with perfect pink lips and staring doe-eyed at an unseen dominant. These pixies are cold and unsmiling; they exist to be pretty and petite, compliant and complacent. They are not the type of submissive I am. I cackle, and giggle, and whine, and sometimes I smear my lipstick, and sometimes I say my safeword. I am neither as strong nor as beautifully delicate as those girls in the far reaches of Instagram’s #DDlgLifestyle hashtag.

The dominant equivalent of those sinewy submissives, in my mind, would smell like “Sir” by D.S. & Durga. It’s a formidably masculine scent, seductive jasmine layered on top of animalistic oakmoss, peppered with bergamot and patchouli. It smells like burying your face in the tweed jacket of a silver fox who smokes clove cigarettes and drinks too much green tea. Like getting a little too intimate with your classics professor during office hours, or like the exotic comfort of curling up in daddy’s lap once he’s home from happy hour with the boys. This is a “Tumblr-dom” scent: it brings to mind black-and-white photos of faceless men in suits, aiming for stately masculinity but coming off slightly caricatured.

My Sir – a fellow fragrance nerd – asked me to choose a scent for him one day, eschewing his usual faves (Molecule 03 and Tobacco Oud, if you must know). I put “Sir” on him partly for its name, but partly because I wanted the strange synthesis of this polished-dominant scent on my real-life dominant, who – handsome and captivating as he may be – will never be a black-and-white besuited Tumblr dom, because no one really is, not even Tumblr doms. As I’m sure it would please my love to see pale pink fetishistic leather digging into my flesh – the fantasy submissive mingling with the real one – so, too, did it please me to smell the mega-masc absurdity of “Sir” against my Sir’s warm and comforting skin. He is my fantasy, and he is much more than that.

What scents put you in a kinky headspace you enjoy?