I’m a Woman and I Wear Men’s Cologne

I wear pink lipstick. I also wear Tom Ford eau de toilette as my everyday cologne. When I first tried it, I didn’t have my glasses on and couldn’t tell that it was a part of the for men collection. What I knew was that I liked the way that it smelled on me — not too powdery as so many women’s scents are, not too overly floral or sweet, but just a bit with some clean, spicy notes. The sales lady looked a bit scandalized when she pointed out that it was a men’s fragrance and I said that I’d take it anyway, but what do I care?

The scent is described like this: Distinctive spice accents, modern woods and a primal impact accord make Tom Ford for men a luxurious fragrance that is both elegant and modern. A reflection of Tom Ford himself, it was created for men who are refined, seductive and sophisticated. I aspire to be refined, seductive, and sophisticated. I want to make a primal impact. Why is this a man thing? Every scent changes slightly as it mixes with your individual body chemistry anyhow and I have yet to have someone tell me, “Hey, you smell like a dude.” Why does this have to be gendered?

Target and Amazon are some of the most visible examples of a company choosing to stop marketing toys as well as home and entertainment products by gender. In 2022 there is definitely no need to have boys’ and girls’ toys. I played with trucks and with dolls as a child, and so did my son. Kids should play with whatever appeals to them and retailers who don’t think so are selling themselves short. With the current popularity of superheroes, smart marketers made costumes for girls available, not just for Batgirl and Supergirl, but for Ironman and Captain America as well. Some girls wanted to dress up like them too, and why shouldn’t they have options?

“Tom Meyvis, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, notes that removing gender labels from toys hands more control to the customer, allowing them to ‘decide for themselves what is the ideal product for their son or daughter, rather than being told this is the category your child falls into.’” I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want some marketing flunky telling my son who he is supposed to be. I don’t want him to be boxed in by 1950s notions of gender identity.

“The impact of color is dramatic, and can taint whether or not a child will play with a toy they may otherwise play with if it was marketed differently. This was reinforced by a 2014 paper co-authored by Dinella, which argued that color can be used to manipulate children’s perceptions of what toys they should play with, and found girls far more likely to opt for traditionally male toys if they were pink. This is not a preference that we are born with. Most cognitive research suggests that all babies actually prefer blue, and any preference girls may have for pink is conditioned, usually arising around the age of 2 years of age, and becoming more pronounced through early life.”

In other words, we’re programming our kids about who they should be essentially from birth. Associating colors with gender is a relatively new concept, however, only beginning in America around the mid-nineteenth century. Before then, all children wore gender-neutral clothing until age 6 or so — often a type of white dress, which helped with diapering, potty training, and stood up to repeated washing in hot water. Pink was considered to be the more masculine color as a form of light red, but even then, associating color with gender was not nearly as rigid as it is today. That’s an idea that only emerged in the early part of the twentieth century.

The pink tax is the practice used by some companies to add cost to products marketed towards women, sometimes by as much as 50%, when they are essentially the same ones produced for men. Take a razor, paint it pink, and wrap it in sparkly packaging, and then you can charge more. Although this undoubtedly has padded the bottom line in the past, women are savvy to this practice now and a lot less tolerant of it.

And besides that, you’re kind of selling yourself short to only target one segment of the population based on something as broad as gender. You could have one product, one marketing campaign, and sell it to everyone, male, female, or other who is a fit for your product in meaningful ways. There are at least 1.2 million people in the US who consider themselves non-binary, and those numbers are growing. Doesn’t that make more sense to target your selling to anyone who might want it? Gendered marketing may look like focused marketing, but it can also have its downsides.

When Dr. Pepper 10 ran a campaign that said the new low-calorie soda was “not for women” they were essentially carving off half of their potential market for no good reason and creating a pointless skirmish in the gender war. “Next time Dr. Pepper, just put genitals on all your beverages, that way we’ll know which ones are ok to drink,” said one female commenter in response.

Modern marketing strategies look beyond demographic binaries to figure out what behaviors and interests their potential customer has, and to seek ways to connect with them based on these. Analysis of social media activity gives a much more complex view than gender alone. Some companies, including fragrance manufacturers, are seeing the upsides of unisex products and more and more of them are becoming available.

Calvin Klein has long been at the forefront of gender-neutral fragrances, with scents like CK one and all. “Liberty London saw a 40 percent rise in the sales of unisex fragrances in-store and online in 2018, so step outside the box of feminine and masculine labels and spray these stunning, on-trend scents,” says Harper’s Bazaar.

Many of these scents are a mix of florals or fruit and more traditionally masculine-identified scents such as leather or smoke. My more dressed-up scent is L from women’s retailer Soft Surroundings. It smells like tobacco and honey and pairs nicely with my husband James’ favorite scent, Tobacco Vanille. Both are rich, earthy, and very sensual.

The fact that one is marketed for a man and one is marketed for a woman is fairly arbitrary. It’s really more a matter of how each scent smells on you the individual. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really need or want to be told what is appropriate or desirable for me by some company and I sure as heck don’t want them telling my son who he is supposed to be and what he is supposed to like. I want the option to wear both pink lipstick and a cologne that smells like bergamot and citrus if that’s what I want — and it is exactly what I want.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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