Apicius:Sherapop:Perhaps the problem is that women's perfumes tend to have bigger sillage? So it's much more obvious when a man wears a "feminine" fragrance than when a woman wears a "masculine" fragrance.
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Sherapop, the thought with the silage is interesting.
The olfactory is not very far away from the gustatory sense. Let us look at how gender is treated in food and compare it to perfumery.
Usually, we are not aware that gender is reflected by food, but it is! Somehow, I have the impression that light, delicate, tender or sweet food is rather aimed at women - at least by the industry and their ad campaigns - whereas stronger, more robust food is aimed at men. For instance, there is a food magazine in Germany that targets an exclusively male audience, and its title is 'Beef'. - Chocolate for ladies is being advertised as very light, maybe filled with some yoghurt cream, whereas chocolate for men must not be too sweet at all: it has to be bitter and pitch dark (In Germany, we have such a product named “Herrenschokolade”!). And you have to admit – eating a cone of raspberry ice cream usually doesn't look very butch.
Maybe you can say that sweet / light/ tender is considered to be feminine, and salty / strong / robust can be regarded as masculine.
Now – who wants sushi, light salads and sweets all day? I can easily drop the sweets for savory or salty food, but I would loose my appetite very soon if I'd had to eat nothing but sweets.
Back to perfumery: It is OK to wear a feminine white musk and vanilla scent (= yoghurt) as a dessert, but not all day. However – white musk is quite sticky and will not leave you so soon. It can be the same with amiable flowery fragrances that have some longevity but are of average quality. After having them around for some hours you desperately want a matie herring or a savoury pickled cucumber.
This is IMHO the main reason why men hardly wear ladies' fragrances – next to being afraid of cross-dressing. Many unisex and male fragrances suit the olfactory sense better in the long run than an average feminine floriental or a sweetish gourmand. I disagree with Greysolon: it is not that men have fewer fragrance options, and that cultural restraints prevent them to buy Chanel No.5 – they simply do not want to wear the feminine fragrances (including me). To create a really grand feminine fragrance that overcomes all these obstacles must be the highest level of perfumery, and we should look out for any of those exceptions.
But there is more to it: Overapplying a floral-fruity feminine scent it riskier than doing the same with a gent's perfume – people might comment on it as 'Nuttendiesel'. (I leave the translation to you) Women who overapply a ladies' scent are treated by far less respectful than men who do the same with their gent's cologne. Back to Sherapop's question: I think, feminine scents do not generally have more silage, but they might be more difficult to use.
Overapplying a feminine scent or wearing a strong ladies' fragrance, of course, can emphasize the wearers femininity – up to the point where, due to such 'vulgarity', some other women get annoyed and many men get afraid. We all know that after several decades of women's lib offensive, strong femininity is still not really accepted in most of our societies. (I always have to grin if I see a really handsome guy being accompanied by an ugly duckling who lacks make-up and perfume).
This has influences on the concept of lightness and / or softness in perfumes. As women have good reason to fear insults by wearing an offensive perfume, lightness and softness have become linked to ladies' fragrances as part of the concept of femininity. Nevertheless, it sometimes appears to me as an evasive movement similar to the evasion into unisex and masculine scents.
I want people to have a positive attitude towards their own gender, and I want them to express that by the perfumes they wear. This is why I want women to wear Vivienne Westwoods "Anglomania" rather than Martin Margielas "(untitled)". Of course, it is OK and necessary to have something discreet an unoffensive in the wardrobe as well. But I despise people like Serge Lutens who I suppose are very well aware of this context but still make their profit by creating olfactory burkas. They stand on the other side of the barricade. Wearing a certain kind of perfume does have political aspects.
So, women wearing gent's colognes – is that evasion from one's own femininity or just from overly sweet and soft perfumes?
There's certainly no dearth of mediocre women's fragrances. No argument there--especially since the advent of flanker madness and the multilaunches. But I think that there are many, many more female than male fragrance launches period. It certainly seems that way from advertisements. So the question is: is there a higher proportion of mediocre women's fragrances than mediocre men's fragrances? Or are you suggesting that it is easier somehow to produce a decent men's fragrance than it is to produce a decent women's fragrance?