Nothing turns a woman off more than the smell of Lynx Africa. Or short-sleeved tiki shirts. Baby voices, too. I won’t go on – that’s a different article – but of all the icks we might encounter, someone’s scent is undoubtedly paramount.
It’s a well-documented fact that we are attracted to some smells and repulsed by others. You’ll have heard the word “pheromones” bandied around a lot in regard to this, referring to how our “natural scent” can be key when it comes to who we do and don’t fancy. The science remains split on how legitimate that is, by the way. But I’d argue that the scent we choose to apply to ourselves is just as – if not more – important when it comes to matters of the heart.
This brings me back to Lynx Africa. For those lucky enough not to be familiar, it’s a particularly potent aftershave that is marketed as a cross between bergamot and sandalwood, offering a woody and powdery scent designed to be refreshing. In reality, it’s more like rotting masculinity with a splash of discarded mango and favoured by teenage boys with porn addictions and emotionally unavailable men in their 30s in desperate need of therapy. Frankly, even the slightest whiff of it has me retching and thinking of all the 15-year-old boys who drowned themselves in the stuff at school.
The smell was all-consuming and would linger long after someone wearing it walked past. Perhaps the boys mistook it for some sort of seduction strategy – I assure you, it was not. But for whatever reason, a lot of men still love to smother themselves in scent, often at the expense of passersby. This week, we learned that Emmanuel Macron might be one of them. According to Le Parisien journalist Olivier Beaumont in his new book, The Tragedy of the Elysée, the French president sprays “industrial amounts” of Dior’s Eau Sauvage each day as some sort of deliberate assertion of power.
“Less-accustomed visitors may find themselves overcome by the floral and musky scent, as refined as it is powerful,” Beaumont writes. “It is a sign of one thing: that the president is in the building. Just as Louis XIV made his perfumes an attribute of power when he paraded through the galleries of Versailles, Emmanuel Macron uses his as an element of his authority at the Elysée.”
I’m not sure who told Macron, or indeed any man, that this is a good idea. But someone has to make it stop. Look, a little fragrance here and there is fine. And deodorant is important; nobody’s suggesting you start reeking of body odour. But anything more than a spritz or two, and you’re losing at least four points of hotness. Nobody wants to snog someone while feeling like they’ve just walked into a perfume shop. There’s just something deeply disturbing about a man who wears too much fragrance, like he’s an ostrich fluffing up his feathers for his next mating dance. It’s overpowering. It’s embarrassing. It’s too try-hard.
The irony is that women love the way men naturally smell – at least, all the women I know do (myself included). I’ve had long conversations about the allure of male sweat, for example, and watched as women have practically climaxed while talking about the scent of a man they’ve just started dating. It’s genuinely something we discuss, knowing just how powerful a man’s natural scent can be, whether it’s on your body or your bedsheets. Maybe it’s lust. Maybe it’s pheromones. But I’ll tell you one thing it definitely isn’t – and that’s Lynx Africa, or any other potent perfume for that matter.
My advice to men who favour their fragrance is to throw it away immediately. Chances are you smell pretty good already – consider it another patriarchal perk, as if you needed any more.
