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" The Library of the Italian Academy at Columbia University is precisely as you might expect: small, chandeliered, and brimming with intriguing-looking leather-bound books. Rivaling the pervasive scent of scholarship one evening this summer, however, was that of fragrance. This was the launch event for the Academy of Perfumery and Aromatics, New York&amp;#039;s mini branch of the French perfume museum L&amp;#039;Osmoth\u00E8que, a Versailles-based whiff-obsessive&amp;#039;s mecca that houses the world&amp;#039;s largest collection of archival eaux. As a curator uncorked the sweet, grassy Le Tr\u00E8fle Incarnat from 1896, my pen ran out of ink, interrupting my sniffing-and-note-scribbling reverie long enough for me to look up and notice something surprising: Almost everyone else in the room was male. In addition to the helpful man seated to my right\u2014a handsome, leather-jacket-clad, silver-skull-ring-wearing hipster who told me he worked for NASA and loaned me a ballpoint\u2014there was a whole host of very dudey dudes (baseball caps, plaid shirts, office-casual suits) huffing the likes of Guerlain&amp;#039;s romantic Mitsouko with undisguised zeal. Interesting, I thought to myself and stole the guy&amp;#039;s pen. What I observed that night, it turns out, is just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to the proliferation of fragrance-freak-geared website forums (Fragrantica, Now Smell This, Basenotes, etc.), there&amp;#039;s been a tremendous increase in opinionated, super-sophisticated scent enthusiasts\u2014the type who rhapsodize about oakmoss, share memories of their first-ever whiff of Opium, and weigh the merits of the latest niche eau to flare the blogosphere&amp;#039;s collective nostrils. And within that newly powerful group, the most rapidly growing demographic is male. While the highly regarded Basenotes, launched in 2000 by Londoner Grant Osborne, laid the groundwork (the site&amp;#039;s guy-dominated &amp;quot;male fragrance discussion&amp;quot; currently has more than one million posts, whereas the female board has only some 317,000), countless others have taken up the mantle. A quick Google search will bring up everything from Fragrance Bros (tagline: &amp;quot;Helping entertain and educate our brothers and sisters about the wonderful world of smelling AWESOME&amp;quot;) to Whiffguy.blogspot.com, the work of a self-proclaimed &amp;quot;Average Guy Fragrance Enthusiast&amp;quot; who gives every scent he reviews a word-association list (for Dolce &amp;amp;amp; Gabbana Homme Light Blue: &amp;quot;Lip balm. Receipts. Crosswalks. Antipasti. Pencil lead. Suede&amp;quot;). And that&amp;#039;s before you even get to the legions of Y-chromosome-bearing YouTube perfume reviewers. &amp;quot;When we first opened our store six years ago, it was predominantly women coming in and befriending us,&amp;quot; says Franco Wright, who cofounded Luckyscent\u2014a niche-fragrance hot spot that exists both online and as a brick-and-mortar boutique in Los Angeles\u2014with his former graphic-design-studio partner Adam Eastwood. &amp;quot;Now that&amp;#039;s completely changed. Probably 60 percent of our regulars are males. They&amp;#039;re the ones who are hanging out and socializing at the store. Some come in almost every day.&amp;quot; If Luckyscent is the L.A. clubhouse for odor-savvy guys, its East Coast counterpart is MiN New York\u2014a welcoming SoHo scent store that, with its dark wood shelving, tufted leather sofas, and carefully selected vintage curios, has the atmosphere of an early-twentieth-century-apothecary- meets-gentleman&amp;#039;s smoking-den. And it&amp;#039;s here, a few months after my revelation at Columbia, that I meet up with a group of male perfume aficionados who have nicknamed themselves the Goodsmellas. Ranging in age from roughly 25 to 60, they&amp;#039;re predominantly straight (most are married) and look, well, pretty ordinary: They could be truck drivers, businessmen, or bankers. Among them are Carlos J. Powell, a bespectacled middle-aged fellow who runs a Facebook group called Peace Love Perfume, where members feverishly post their SOTM, SOTA, and SOTE (scents of the morning, afternoon, and evening, respectively); Andrew Buck, a suit-and-tie-wearing business consultant who writes a blog called Scentrist in his spare time; Eddie Libassi, aka Frunkinator, a young, tattooed guy in a black T-shirt who helms a popular YouTube channel dedicated to testosterone-charged fragrance reviews, sometimes dispatched from behind the wheel of his car (these are tagged &amp;quot;Frunk in Motion&amp;quot;); and IT specialist Rich Scardaville, a self-described &amp;quot;regular fragrance fan&amp;quot; who tests perfumes every night before he goes to bed to determine which he&amp;#039;ll wear the next day to work. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll put on five, six, seven things up and down my arm,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;and my poor girlfriend will want to go to sleep in the other room because there&amp;#039;s this cloud around me. She&amp;#039;s always like, &amp;#039;Just pick one already!&amp;#039;&amp;quot; The Goodsmellas congregate at MiN on a regular basis not just for samples, which cute-couple co-owners Chad Murawczyk and Mindy Yang distribute readily, but for the community it provides. Some of them share &amp;quot;splits&amp;quot; (one buys the bottle, then decants samples for the others); they compare notes, literally, on their collections (most own between 150 and 250 full bottles of perfume, plus several hundred samples) and storage solutions (Scardaville keeps his in a hardware bench with alphabetically labeled drawers; Libassi stockpiles his favorites in a wine cooler with modified shelving). They discuss which eaux are most work-appropriate, consider whether or not it&amp;#039;s too girly to wear florals (consensus: It&amp;#039;s not), and debate the viability of having a signature scent. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no such thing,&amp;quot; Buck says. &amp;quot;There are times when you want something light and citrusy and times when you want a deep wood. Nothing fits every occasion. You&amp;#039;re not going to wear a dress loafer to go out running.&amp;quot; Sometimes they&amp;#039;ll all have a drink or go out to dinner together, but mostly they just wander around the store and inhale. &amp;quot;We can talk to each other, because we have this shared value system,&amp;quot; Murawczyk says. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re all in completely different lines of work, so we have nothing to do with each other on a nine-to-five basis, but in this world, we have an interconnect.&amp;quot; For many of the men in the MiN crowd, the appeal of fragrance is rooted in their childhood (&amp;quot;I remember seeing bottles on my father&amp;#039;s dresser,&amp;quot; Fragrant Moments blogger Barney Bishop says, &amp;quot;and figuring, &amp;#039;All right, that&amp;#039;s what manhood is all about&amp;#039;&amp;quot;) or arose as the result of some accidental discovery. Scardaville, for example, fell for By Kilian&amp;#039;s Incense Oud after being randomly spritzed by a saleswoman in Bergdorf Goodman. &amp;quot;While I was walking around the store I was just amazed at how this fragrance developed and changed on my skin and became a part of me,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;When I found out how much it cost, I almost dropped dead, but I&amp;#039;ve never regretted buying it.&amp;quot; Goodsmella Mike Devine&amp;#039;s story is more dramatic. A police-officer first responder on September 11, he gradually lost his sense of smell during months of clean-up at Ground Zero. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know exactly what caused it, and I didn&amp;#039;t particularly care at the time,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;What mattered was living through the experience.&amp;quot; It was two and a half years before he began to detect odors again. &amp;quot;The first thing was concrete dust at a construction site,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It was welcome to a certain degree, but all I could really smell were the sinister smells that took me back to a dark place. So I started to seek out beautiful-smelling things to counteract all that negativity.&amp;quot; Devine began with candles and air fresheners, then moved on to fragrances, which he now uses to build what he calls &amp;quot;habit trails,&amp;quot; or new scent memories, by carefully selecting a perfume to accompany a specific happy episode. &amp;quot;Like, I went on a cruise to the Bahamas and the only fragrance I wore was Acqua di Parma so that every moment of every day was filled with that smell,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Now a couple years later I can go back to that bottle and the memories are still there. It&amp;#039;s a very cool game to play.&amp;quot; The connection between scent and memory is well-known (thank you, Proust), but neurologist Alan Hirsch, MD, director of the Smell &amp;amp;amp; Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, says that there&amp;#039;s also a close correlation between what you smell and the way you feel. &amp;quot;The reason scent is so intricately related to happiness is because the part of the brain that smells, or the olfactory lobe, is actually part of the limbic system, or the emotional brain,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;If you see a picture of a horse, first you identify what it is, and then you figure out whether or not you like it, but with smell it&amp;#039;s the exact opposite. You smell something and immediately react to it, and then you figure out whether it&amp;#039;s a rose or a lilac or whatever. Smell is the quickest way to change someone&amp;#039;s mood or behavior, because it happens totally independently of thought.&amp;quot; The scent of lavender, for example, has a calming effect, while vanilla, oddly, that smell of innocence and baking, has been found to be sexually arousing. Jasmine, according to three separate studies\u2014the first on mice, the second two on humans, including baseball players\u2014can have as profound a calming effect as Valium and can dramatically improve hand-eye coordination. The sharp delight of smelling something glorious lasts only a few seconds before the nose gets accustomed to the scent, so it becomes a bit like chasing a ghost\u2014and this thrill-of-the-hunt aspect seems to be in keeping with the way male fragrance fanatics are hardwired. As Murawczyk says, &amp;quot;The quest is to find something that feels like it&amp;#039;s lighting up a new part of your brain.&amp;quot; Most of the Goodsmellas started their collections with widely popular eaux such as Acqua di Gi\u00F2, then gradually began to explore the niche realm looking for more off-the-map olfactory experiences. &amp;quot;I started out just going into department stores and smelling fragrances,&amp;quot; says Libassi, &amp;quot;but when I got to the point when I could walk along the wall in Sephora and go, &amp;#039;That smells like almond, that smells like rose...&amp;#039; then I was like, &amp;#039;Where&amp;#039;s the next wall?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; (Although he wouldn&amp;#039;t rule out something just because it&amp;#039;s mainstream: &amp;quot;A good juice is a good juice.&amp;quot;) &amp;quot;After a while,&amp;quot; Buck says, &amp;quot;you start looking for something that smacks you in the face and makes you think, Wow, I&amp;#039;ve never thought of that combination of notes before. You might be like, &amp;#039;This isn&amp;#039;t for me, but it&amp;#039;s fascinating.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Fragrance is intrinsically associated with sex and attraction, and one can assume that the average male scent spritzer isn&amp;#039;t putting the stuff on merely to delight his nose alone: A recent 22-minute dispatch titled &amp;quot;How to Get More Compliments With Your Fragrance,&amp;quot; from YouTube fragrance reviewer DracDoc, garnered more than 2,100 views. Still, most hard-core juice junkies maintain that they wear and collect perfumes primarily for themselves. In fact, most of the Goodsmellas say their girlfriends and wives, while tolerant, don&amp;#039;t share their passion for scent (&amp;quot;It stinks,&amp;quot; says Libassi, seemingly oblivious to his pun). They do, however, like it when women indulge\u2014top picks among the group include Herm\u00E8s Un Jardin Sur Le Toit, Frederic Malle Carnal Flower, By Kilian Liaisons Dangeureuses, and Stella by Stella McCartney. &amp;quot;When my girlfriend wears Amouage Memoir Woman, I&amp;#039;m just mesmerized,&amp;quot; Scardaville says. &amp;quot;I could follow her around all day long.&amp;quot; While none of the Goodsmellas object to anointing themselves with fragrances marketed toward the opposite sex (Powell says he gets most attention from women at work when wearing Dior&amp;#039;s heady oriental Hypnotic Poison), they are drawn to more traditionally masculine elements. Of the all-time favorites they name\u2014including Creed Spice and Wood, Xerjoff Richwood, Tom Ford Black Violet, and By Kilian Back To Black\u2014nearly all feature warm patchouli, tobacco, musk, and woody notes. Luckyscent&amp;#039;s Eastwood says that &amp;quot;dirty, smoky&amp;quot; oud and leather tend to be popular with his store&amp;#039;s male clientele: &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re interested in those fragrances that are a little bit bolder, richer, and more complex.&amp;quot; In general, Eastwood says, male fragrance devotees &amp;quot;can be a little more intense&amp;quot; than their female counterparts. &amp;quot;We have guys who call us the second they read about a new fragrance, asking if we can overnight it to them right away or wanting a preview. &amp;#039;Does the leather note last all the way through? How strong is the sillage? What&amp;#039;s the dry-down?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Men like to be connoisseurs,&amp;quot; Wright adds. &amp;quot;So when they get into fragrance, it&amp;#039;s like they get into cars or music. There&amp;#039;s a lot of interest in the ingredients. Just like men are obsessed with small-batch bourbon, they could just as easily be obsessed with a certain specific note in a fragrance and who the perfumer was.&amp;quot; Buck compares the commitment of a perfume collector to that of an oenophile: Both are pleasure-seeking hobbies, and neither of them are cheap. &amp;quot;We might be spending $300 on a bottle,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;but at least it lasts longer than wine, where you might spend the same amount and then drink it in a night.&amp;quot; Says Devine, without a hint of regret: &amp;quot;I think my fragrance collection is worth more than my car.&amp;quot; A decade ago, collecting fragrances might not have been deemed a particularly manly pursuit, but times have changed. Roughly 50 percent of men now buy their own scents (as opposed to having them pressed upon them by significant others); between January and October 2011, the men&amp;#039;s fine-fragrance category grew faster than women&amp;#039;s (with sales increasing 12 percent and 9 percent, respectively); and the explosion of the niche-perfumery market has offered myriad ways for Goodsmella types to get nerdy. Wright attributes the fact that guys seem to be willing to drop more cash on smelling good to the same shift in twenty-first-century culture that&amp;#039;s made seeing dudes drinking $12 artisanal cocktails as common as spotting those quaffing PBR, or the same gender-blind appreciation of the finer things that has made Brad Pitt the first male face of Chanel No. 5. &amp;quot;Not all guys we sell fragrance to are fascinated with the minor details,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;There are a lot of regular guys who come in looking for a scent who just don&amp;#039;t want to wear the mass-market stuff. It&amp;#039;s like, as you grow older you get more discerning about your wardrobe\u2014I think that that&amp;#039;s seeping into the mentality of guys when it comes to fragrance. The guy who&amp;#039;s moving away from Levi&amp;#039;s and starting to get into hard-core indie jeans from Japan is probably also getting into edgier fragrance brands like Comme des Gar\u00E7ons or Escentric Molecules.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;One thing that guys understand is an upgrade,&amp;quot; Murawczyk says. &amp;quot;That makes sense to them. I think any guy with a sense of self is trying to figure out different categories in which he can improve himself, or hone his identity through what he consumes and what he surrounds himself with, and fragrance is one of those things.&amp;quot; He gestures to the clientele currently milling around MiN\u2014a couple spraying scent strips and waving them under each other&amp;#039;s noses; a mother struggling to keep her toddler from capsizing a display table; and a few men carefully scrutinizing shiny flacons and venturing cautious sniffs. &amp;quot;Perfume is having a real moment across the board, but this giant awakening is happening with men in particular because women have understood the power and seduction of fragrance for a lot longer,&amp;quot; Murawczyk continues. &amp;quot;But, you know, we get it. It&amp;#039;s not about using the fragrance to get the girl or using the fragrance to land the job\u2014it&amp;#039;s just life enriching. And when you figure that out, it&amp;#039;s like seeing color.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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