Unisex Is Not a Category

Clear bottle of 04 Tea Beneath Clouds extrait de parfum with white label and black square cap

Walk into most department stores and there are two fragrance counters. One is dark glass and slate. The other is pale and reflective. A staff member will ask who it's for, and the answer they're expecting is a gender.

None of that is old. Almost all of it is younger than the electric light bulb.

Perfume was not gendered for most of its history

Through the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe, men and women used the same materials — the same animalics, resins, florals and aromatics — with no meaningful distinction between them. Scent signified wealth, hygiene, devotion, status, protection from disease. It did not signify sex.

Gender arrived in perfumery at the end of the nineteenth century, and it arrived for commercial reasons. Two things made it possible at once. Synthetic aromachemicals appeared, which let perfumery become an industry with mass production rather than a craft supplying the rich. And an industry with mass production needs market segments.

Splitting the customer base in two doubles the addressable market. That's the whole mechanism. Nothing about the chemistry changed, and nothing about human noses changed. The catalogue changed.

Jicky, 1889

Guerlain's Jicky is the fragrance usually placed at this hinge. Created for women, it was taken up enthusiastically by men at the time, and it's routinely described now as the first unisex perfume.

The interesting thing isn't that men wore it. Men wore everything before that. It's that by 1889 this had become notable — a thing worth remarking on. The categories were new enough that crossing them was a story.

CK One, 1994

A century later, CK One was launched as the first openly, deliberately marketed unisex fragrance. The tagline said it outright: a fragrance for a man or a woman. Alberto Morillas and Harry Fremont composed it. At its peak the company reported twenty bottles selling every minute.

It's easy to be snobbish about CK One now — it's clean, it's a period piece, you can smell 1994 in it. But it demonstrated something the industry had spent a hundred years insisting was false: that you could sell one bottle to everybody and sell an enormous number of them.

What the categories actually encode

Here's the thing that makes the two-counter system hard to defend once you look at it directly. The gendering isn't in the materials. It's in the marketing conventions attached to them, and those conventions are local and recent.

Vanilla, rose, iris, and orange blossom all read as feminine in contemporary Western marketing. Rose is traditionally a masculine material across much of the Middle East. Lavender has traditionally been a men's fragrance staple in Europe and is used freely across the line elsewhere. Tobacco and leather read masculine in one decade and were doing quite different work in another.

None of those materials know anything. A molecule has no opinion about who is wearing it. What you're actually navigating in a department store is a century of advertising decisions, presented as though it were information about the substance.

The genuinely useful distinction — the one people are usually reaching for when they say a fragrance is masculine or feminine — is something more like weight, sweetness, projection and register. Those are real properties. They just don't map onto gender, and pretending they do costs people fragrances they would have loved.

Where it stands now

The category has been dissolving for a while. Most serious independent houses don't gender their releases at all — not as a political stance, but because segmenting a small line into two halves is commercially absurd when your whole customer base is people who already choose by smell.

The mainstream is following at the usual lag, mostly through the euphemism of "shared" or "for everyone", and largely because the customers under thirty stopped asking the question.

We'd flag one honest caveat. Unisex is becoming a marketing category of its own, which is funny and a little grim — a third counter, with its own visual language of unbleached card and minimal sans-serif type, sold at a premium as a signal of taste. Refusing to gender a fragrance is not in itself an achievement. It's just declining to do something arbitrary.

Why every one of ours is unlabelled

All eight fragrances in Chapter One are unisex, and we should be straight about the reasoning rather than claiming a principle we then charge for.

The collection is built around moments, not people. 05 is dark fruit warm under a cold sky. 03 is the space between two people, close enough to feel the warmth of skin. Those are situations. A situation doesn't have a gender, and the fragrance built for it can't sensibly have one either.

It also just isn't our call. You'll wear it on your skin, where it will smell slightly different from how it smells on anyone else, and the only question that matters is whether you like what happens.

There's no right answer printed on the box. There never was — the box was printed a hundred years ago by someone who wanted to sell two bottles instead of one.

Chapter One is eight fragrances, 01 through 08 — currently sold out. Join the list to be notified first.

Journal Opinion

Unisex Is Not a Category

Perfume was ungendered for most of its history. The men's and women's aisles are a sales invention roughly a century old — and they're dissolving.

4 min read

Clear bottle of 04 Tea Beneath Clouds extrait de parfum with white label and black square cap

Walk into most department stores and there are two fragrance counters. One is dark glass and slate. The other is pale and reflective. A staff member will ask who it's for, and the answer they're expecting is a gender.

None of that is old. Almost all of it is younger than the electric light bulb.

Perfume was not gendered for most of its history

Through the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe, men and women used the same materials — the same animalics, resins, florals and aromatics — with no meaningful distinction between them. Scent signified wealth, hygiene, devotion, status, protection from disease. It did not signify sex.

Gender arrived in perfumery at the end of the nineteenth century, and it arrived for commercial reasons. Two things made it possible at once. Synthetic aromachemicals appeared, which let perfumery become an industry with mass production rather than a craft supplying the rich. And an industry with mass production needs market segments.

Splitting the customer base in two doubles the addressable market. That's the whole mechanism. Nothing about the chemistry changed, and nothing about human noses changed. The catalogue changed.

Jicky, 1889

Guerlain's Jicky is the fragrance usually placed at this hinge. Created for women, it was taken up enthusiastically by men at the time, and it's routinely described now as the first unisex perfume.

The interesting thing isn't that men wore it. Men wore everything before that. It's that by 1889 this had become notable — a thing worth remarking on. The categories were new enough that crossing them was a story.

CK One, 1994

A century later, CK One was launched as the first openly, deliberately marketed unisex fragrance. The tagline said it outright: a fragrance for a man or a woman. Alberto Morillas and Harry Fremont composed it. At its peak the company reported twenty bottles selling every minute.

It's easy to be snobbish about CK One now — it's clean, it's a period piece, you can smell 1994 in it. But it demonstrated something the industry had spent a hundred years insisting was false: that you could sell one bottle to everybody and sell an enormous number of them.

What the categories actually encode

Here's the thing that makes the two-counter system hard to defend once you look at it directly. The gendering isn't in the materials. It's in the marketing conventions attached to them, and those conventions are local and recent.

Vanilla, rose, iris, and orange blossom all read as feminine in contemporary Western marketing. Rose is traditionally a masculine material across much of the Middle East. Lavender has traditionally been a men's fragrance staple in Europe and is used freely across the line elsewhere. Tobacco and leather read masculine in one decade and were doing quite different work in another.

None of those materials know anything. A molecule has no opinion about who is wearing it. What you're actually navigating in a department store is a century of advertising decisions, presented as though it were information about the substance.

The genuinely useful distinction — the one people are usually reaching for when they say a fragrance is masculine or feminine — is something more like weight, sweetness, projection and register. Those are real properties. They just don't map onto gender, and pretending they do costs people fragrances they would have loved.

Where it stands now

The category has been dissolving for a while. Most serious independent houses don't gender their releases at all — not as a political stance, but because segmenting a small line into two halves is commercially absurd when your whole customer base is people who already choose by smell.

The mainstream is following at the usual lag, mostly through the euphemism of "shared" or "for everyone", and largely because the customers under thirty stopped asking the question.

We'd flag one honest caveat. Unisex is becoming a marketing category of its own, which is funny and a little grim — a third counter, with its own visual language of unbleached card and minimal sans-serif type, sold at a premium as a signal of taste. Refusing to gender a fragrance is not in itself an achievement. It's just declining to do something arbitrary.

Why every one of ours is unlabelled

All eight fragrances in Chapter One are unisex, and we should be straight about the reasoning rather than claiming a principle we then charge for.

The collection is built around moments, not people. 05 is dark fruit warm under a cold sky. 03 is the space between two people, close enough to feel the warmth of skin. Those are situations. A situation doesn't have a gender, and the fragrance built for it can't sensibly have one either.

It also just isn't our call. You'll wear it on your skin, where it will smell slightly different from how it smells on anyone else, and the only question that matters is whether you like what happens.

There's no right answer printed on the box. There never was — the box was printed a hundred years ago by someone who wanted to sell two bottles instead of one.

Chapter One is eight fragrances, 01 through 08 — currently sold out. Join the list to be notified first.

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