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"  Years of playing swoon-worthy, twinkly-eyed leading men must have taught Patrick Dempsey a thing or two about what women want. When he meets me in the sprawling penthouse of the Beverly Wilshire\u2014yes, the Pretty Woman hotel\u2014his first words are: &amp;quot;Want some champagne?&amp;quot; Followed by: &amp;quot;So, you&amp;#039;re from North Carolina?&amp;quot; (Do your research, gents, and you&amp;#039;ll have us at hello.) Here&amp;#039;s what Dempsey has picked up from five seasons as thwarted lovebird Derek Shepherd on Grey&amp;#039;s Anatomy (a show, he points out, that&amp;#039;s written by a woman, the formidable Shonda Rhimes): &amp;quot;Shepherd\u2014he listens. Men have a tendency to want to get to the bottom line, but they need to be patient. I think women want to be just heard. At the end of the day, they want to be protected, nurtured, and also have a lot of freedom, too, to go off and do their own thing.&amp;quot;  Dempsey&amp;#039;s sharp sense for the wants of the modern woman has come in handy in his second career: cologne magnate. After staking out a place in the men&amp;#039;s fragrance world last year, with Avon&amp;#039;s Unscripted, he&amp;#039;s launching Patrick Dempsey 2, a cozy saffron-and-spicy-woods blend (women who love men&amp;#039;s fragrances are sure to borrow this one from their boyfriends). Who does Dempsey trust to make sure these are eaux that ladies will buy, buy, buy? His uniquely qualified wife, Avon Global Creative Color Director, Jillian. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s got to smell me, so she better like it,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It all comes down to that, doesn&amp;#039;t it?&amp;quot;  The men&amp;#039;s fragrance industry\u2014which in 2008 raked in $854 million at department stores and $204 million at mass retailers\u2014has a rather singular mission: calibrate scents (and ad concepts, bottles, and, often, a celebrity spokesperson) to appeal to both men and the women who love them, not necessarily in that order. Yes, certain well-groomed guys want to smell good for their own sake; and of course plenty of men could care less about enticing a girl at all. But &amp;quot;in general, in the American market, about 50 percent of men&amp;#039;s fragrances are bought by men, and 50 percent are bought by women for men,&amp;quot; says Charlotta Perlangeli, the VP of global marketing for Calvin Klein fragrances. &amp;quot;We definitely take both into account.&amp;quot;  Derek Jeter, Avon&amp;#039;s other man-traction, phoned in from Seattle last summer, hours before the Yankees creamed the Mariners, to discuss the zesty new juniper, sage, and sandalwood Driven Sport, his fourth fragrance in three years. Jeter&amp;#039;s got the guys on the team hooked\u2014&amp;quot;they&amp;#039;ll sort of make fun of me at first, and then when no one&amp;#039;s around, they&amp;#039;ll ask me for some&amp;quot;\u2014but he says the real judge and jury consist of his mom, his sister, and his female agent (and, presumably, rumored fianc\u00E9e Minka Kelly). &amp;quot;I think a woman&amp;#039;s opinion on a men&amp;#039;s fragrance means more than a man&amp;#039;s opinion,&amp;quot; Jeter says. &amp;quot;Especially at Avon, where women are the ones who sell it. If I don&amp;#039;t sell them, they&amp;#039;re not going to sell the fragrance.&amp;quot; (Something tells me he has little to worry about on either count.)  The idea that the right scent will help a guy &amp;quot;get&amp;quot; the girl sounds like marketing hooey\u2014if a man is vile enough, even holy water isn&amp;#039;t going to help him. Yet who among us hasn&amp;#039;t been hooked (or, equally, repelled) by that whiff of Kryptonite emerging from a beloved&amp;#039;s T-shirt neckline? In high school, I crushed on a heavily hair-gelled heart stomper who bathed in Obsession (16-year-olds in mushroom clouds of man-scent? Blech. But boy, I&amp;#039;d have happily swilled the stuff back then). In my twenties, I irrationally, unhappily adored a man who wore a now-defunct Guerlain spritz; I spent most of our relationship with my nose burrowed into his throat, as if I might find a truffle there. And I&amp;#039;m no snob: I&amp;#039;ve recently developed an unexpected fondness for Old Spice deodorant ($2.69), which wafted its way into my life completely by accident: My boyfriend stole it from his father in a moment of desperation. Suddenly, it&amp;#039;s the smell of masculinity, love, and hard work.  What do women want? If only it were that simple. According to one oft-cited bit of research, the one smell that&amp;#039;s proven to arouse us is that of Good &amp;amp;amp; Plenty candies. This theory might explain generations of movie theater make-out sessions (well, that and the dark room), but it has yet to result in a lady-slaying, licorice-scented cologne. Likewise, new pheromone love potions seem to pop up every few years; but without the clinical data\u2014or a convincingly slick ad campaign\u2014to back them up, these novelties have yet to conquer the market (or the fairer sex).  Rodrigo Flores-Roux, a veteran per\u00ADfumer who has concocted iconic scents for Tom Ford and Donna Karan, says the eaux he mixed up for John Varvatos (For Men, Artisan, Vintage, Rock Volume One) seem to be especially adept at keeping the ladies coming back, but even he struggles to specify why. &amp;quot;Men like them because women are the ones who point them out,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Women like them because...they just have that thing that appeals to them.&amp;quot; Some companies go to great lengths to nail down that &amp;quot;thing.&amp;quot; Based on a 13-country poll of 3,500 women ages 18 to 35, Axe determined that 70 percent of us prefer chocolate to shopping, jewelry, and even sex. The company&amp;#039;s marketing team staged an internal ice cream party and rewatched the refrigerator scene from 9\u00BD Weeks, then tasked a team of ultra-sophistiqu\u00E9 Parisian noses at fragrance firm IFF to come up with a smell that was &amp;quot;lickable&amp;quot; yet still had the &amp;quot;hairs and balls&amp;quot; of a signature Axe fragrance (an unfortunate juxtaposition of phrases, but hey, that&amp;#039;s Axe for you). Dark Temptation\u2014internal code name: Urge\u2014is, frankly, delicious: spicy, warm, sexy, and not at all sugary. If Axe could engineer its nozzle to release a discreet, nonasphyxiating quantity of the stuff, I&amp;#039;d buy it in bulk.  Other brands seem to build on the old-fashioned-sounding notion that what a woman really wants is a rich man. Niche perfumery Bond No. 9&amp;#039;s latest addition to its Andy Warhol series is Success is a Job in New York. Spritzing a man with something that&amp;#039;s supposed to smell like money\u2014eau de dough, if you will\u2014probably won&amp;#039;t turn him into a human ATM. It may, however, make him wonder if you&amp;#039;re trying to tell him something.  Slightly subtler, but no less pointed, the artist known as 50 Cent has a new cologne, too. It&amp;#039;s called Power by Fifty Cent. (Evidently, when Fitty puts on his perfumer hat, he becomes Fifty.) The day we met, the rapper&amp;#039;s well-documented musculature was hidden beneath a pink-checked button-down, and his boyish smile could have out-dreamied McDempsey. Powerful, indeed. Fifty favors Tom Ford suits and Audemars Piguet watches\u2014today&amp;#039;s three-inch model was chosen for its resemblance to the cap of his fragrance bottle\u2014and, good news, has rather open-minded taste in women: &amp;quot;You know how some people have a type? Not me,&amp;quot; he says with a laugh. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve seen things I didn&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;d find attractive in a woman, and thought, Wow, she&amp;#039;s beautiful.&amp;quot;  The Five-Oh has his theories, naturally, on what women want. &amp;quot;Besides physical attributes, stability is attractive,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It comes with being successful, and that success being publicly noted\u2014that&amp;#039;s power.&amp;quot; Fifty assures me that many women find this quality appealing; he&amp;#039;s betting those ladies also like men who smell like lemon leaves, coriander, nutmeg, and patchouli. Chances are, if women think Power will give their mate whatever Fifty has, they&amp;#039;ll buy it.  For me, the true test of a men&amp;#039;s scent has long been its &amp;quot;nuzzle-ability.&amp;quot; I was on the verge of trademarking this useful term until Perlangeli informed me that it&amp;#039;s part of fragrance marketing 101. Notes like vanilla, cream, and coffee, which are vaguely sweet but not at all feminine, tend to make us snuggle in for a closer sniff. The new CK Free features coffee and a creamy, soft note of suede; Flores-Roux&amp;#039;s latest project, for the niche men&amp;#039;s grooming brand Alford &amp;amp;amp; Hoff, is equally nuzzle-y. The brand&amp;#039;s owners, two ex-Arizona State football players with a taste for the high life, demanded &amp;quot;a guy&amp;#039;s guy perfume\u2014a manly thing. Nothing too fresh, nothing light, nothing citrusy,&amp;quot; says Flores-Roux; one of them further specified &amp;quot;something that&amp;#039;s like the good part of getting a punch in the gut.&amp;quot; The juice he concocted contains a biting green note of avocado leaf, oakwood extract from aged wooden wine casks, and Madagascan vanilla. Does it pack a believable punch? I wouldn&amp;#039;t know. But I concur with Flores-Roux: &amp;quot;It makes you want to snuggle up next to the guy. It&amp;#039;s visceral.&amp;quot; That is to say, it&amp;#039;s exactly what we want. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/makeup-skin-care/tips/a2446/cologne-what-women-want-383498/>