Can You Smell a Perfume’s Commercial Gender Category?

If people smell a perfume without seeing its bottle, advertising, or name, do the retail categories for women and for men come across unchanged? Or do more perfumes seem as though they could belong to either category when scent is the only information available?

In a study published in 2013, Anna Lindqvist asked 18 university students to smell 12 commercial perfumes and say how they would classify them. The study examined not only agreement with commercial categories, but also whether impressions of femininity and masculinity really separated the perfumes into two groups.

Smelling 12 perfumes from unnamed bottles

Participants were Stockholm University students aged 20–30: nine women and nine men. The paper describes all of them as heterosexual and as having a gender identity corresponding to their sex assigned at birth. The sample did not represent a broad range of ages or diverse backgrounds.

The perfumes comprised six marketed at the time for women, five for men, and one as unisex. They were chosen to include varied scent characteristics, including floral, fruity, spicy, and woody notes. The paper did not disclose the brands.

One milliliter of each perfume was placed in a 500-milliliter glass bottle covered with aluminum foil. Four bottles of each perfume were prepared, making 48 bottles divided among four assessment tasks. Participants smelled the perfumes from the bottles without seeing the original packaging or brand information.

Why measure femininity and masculinity separately?

The first task was to classify each perfume as feminine, masculine, or unisex. This was not a quiz asking participants to guess its retail category: they were asked how they themselves wanted to classify it.

Participants then rated perceived femininity and perceived masculinity on separate tasks, each using a 0–10 scale. The final task assessed scent intensity. Bottle order for each task was randomized separately for each participant.

Femininity and masculinity were asked about separately to avoid placing them at opposite ends of a single scale from the outset. If the scale assumes that a more feminine scent must be less masculine, the question establishes that relationship before measuring it. The author wanted to investigate how the two impressions were actually related.

Opposing impressions did not create two separate groups

The mean ratings for each perfume showed a strong relationship: greater perceived femininity was associated with lower perceived masculinity. The correlation between the two ratings was minus 0.93.

However, this did not mean that the perfumes divided neatly into a feminine group and a masculine group. Many occupied positions between the extremes.

For example, arranging colors from warm to cool is different from separating every color unambiguously into one of two boxes. Similarly, the perfumes in this study could be ordered by the degree of their gender associations while still spreading across the middle of the range.

Only three of the 12 perfumes scored above 7.5 out of 10 for either impression. The author interpreted this as indicating strong gender associations for a small number of perfumes, while many others were difficult to capture with just two categories.

More perfumes were perceived as unisex than were marketed that way

On average, participants classified 3.8 of the 12 perfumes as unisex, or approximately 32%. Only one of the 12, approximately 8%, was commercially categorized as unisex.

In particular, 89% of participants classified one perfume marketed for women as unisex. Conversely, only 33% classified the commercially unisex perfume as unisex.

More than 83% of participants agreed with the commercial category for only three perfumes, the same three with strong gender associations. The findings therefore do not show that commercial categories and scent impressions were wholly unrelated. Agreement was greater for products with pronounced associations, whereas intermediate perfumes were assigned other categories.

The approximately 32% figure is the average proportion of products each participant classified as unisex. It does not mean that 32% of participants considered perfume in general to be unisex.

What about who smelled the perfume and differences in intensity?

Female and male participant groups ranked the perfumes similarly in terms of which were more feminine or masculine. However, similar rankings do not establish that the two groups gave identical rating values.

There were also no significant correlations between the intensity of each perfume and its perceived femininity or masculinity. The results provided no basis for explaining the findings simply as stronger scents seeming more masculine, but they did not prove that intensity can never matter under other conditions.

Categories communicate meaning as well as scent

The author discusses the possibility that culturally learned associations contribute to links between floral scents and femininity, or particular spices and masculinity. She also considers whether commercial categories communicate an image or identity for the wearer, rather than merely describing scent properties.

However, this experiment neither compared cultures nor manipulated advertising. These explanations are the author’s interpretations of the mismatch found between commercial categories and perception. The study cannot establish that biological factors play no role, or that advertising explains everything.

The methodological proposal is also important. When experiments treat perfumes as feminine or masculine, researchers should measure how participants actually perceive them instead of adopting retail classifications unchanged. The author also argues for examining the assumptions built into questions and scales.

Summary

For 12 perfumes presented without names or packaging, perceptions of femininity and masculinity were strongly inversely related. Even so, the perfumes did not form two clearly separate groups, and more were judged unisex than their commercial categories suggested.

These findings concern 18 young Swedish students and a limited selection of products available at the time. They do not describe the entire current market or determine who prefers what. Nevertheless, it is useful to distinguish categories used for selling perfume from those perceived by people smelling it. The study also questions how to measure the range of scent impressions without narrowing it in advance to two predefined categories.

References

Lindqvist, A. (2013). Gender Categorization of Perfumes: The Difference between Odour Perception and Commercial Classification. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 21(3), 218–231. DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2013.820216 / Full article. Original article: © 2013 The Nordic Association for Women’s Studies and Gender Research.