"Unisex fragrance" gets talked about like a new trend, but the truth is closer to the opposite: perfume wasn't meaningfully split by gender for most of its history. The modern "men's" and "women's" fragrance aisles are a relatively recent invention — what's actually changing now is that shoppers are simply going back to ignoring them.
A brief history of a divide that isn't as old as it feels
Ancient and classical perfumery — Egyptian, Roman, early Islamic and Indian traditions among them — didn't organise scent by gender at all; fragrance was a marker of status, ritual, or occasion, worn by anyone who could afford it. The strict "his and hers" categorisation that feels so permanent today largely crystallised through 20th-century advertising and department store merchandising — a marketing convenience more than a chemical one. There was never anything about a rose molecule or a sandalwood molecule that made it inherently gendered; the association was built, over decades, through packaging and branding rather than the fragrance itself.
What actually makes a scent "read" as masculine or feminine
Certain notes do carry cultural associations — powdery, sweet florals have leaned "feminine" in Western marketing, while dark woods, leather, and tobacco have leaned "masculine" — but these are learned associations, not fixed rules, and they shift across cultures and decades. Notes like citrus, vetiver, musk, and many woods have always sat more neutrally, which is exactly why fragrances built around them — Clementine & Vetiver and Santal Rush among them — tend to feel equally at home on anyone who wears them.
Why more people are choosing this way now
Beyond the cultural shift, there are practical reasons unisex fragrances have become the default for a lot of shoppers: fewer artificial categories to filter through, the option to share a bottle with a partner or family member, and, for many people, a scent that simply feels more like a personal choice than a rule someone else made for them decades ago through marketing.
If you're building a fragrance wardrobe from scratch, starting with unisex, note-neutral scents is also just practical — they tend to be the easiest to layer, the easiest to gift without guessing, and the least likely to feel dated as trends shift.
The fragrance itself never needed the label. It's just taken this long for the shopping habits to catch up.
