Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male

Le Male is one of the few fragrances that changed what men were willing to smell like. It launched in 1995, and it is the work of Francis Kurkdjian, who was twenty-five at the time and who would later found his own house and become the in-house perfumer at Dior. Almost nothing about it was safe. The bottle is a sailor's torso, sold in a tin can. The scent puts a huge dose of vanilla and tonka into a men's fragrance at a moment when men's fragrances were meant to smell of soap and sea spray. Gaultier's own copy still frames it around the sailor, the figure the designer returned to across his career, and points to lavender as the familiar, reassuring smell of shaving soap, made sensual by vanilla. The house's short listing on the current product page reads simply mint, lavender, vanilla. The full pyramid usually published adds cardamom, bergamot and artemisia to that minty-lavender opening, cinnamon, orange blossom and caraway in the heart, and amber, sandalwood and cedar under the vanilla and tonka. What made it revolutionary is the collision. The top is icy, almost toothpaste-bright, all mint and shaved lavender. Then it turns, and keeps turning, into something warm, powdery and sweet that smells like clean skin and barbershop talc at the same time. It is a fougere wearing a dessert, and thousands of imitators have been built on that idea since. It is a night-out fragrance and always has been. On a summer evening in Johannesburg it is at home; in daytime heat it can become too much, too fast. Younger wearers still gravitate to it, which after three decades says something. Two honest caveats. First, it is extremely well known, so wearing it is a statement about being part of a tradition rather than being original. Second, it has been reformulated repeatedly across thirty years, and wearers who compare old and new bottles consistently describe the current eau de toilette as sweeter, cleaner and less sharp-edged than 1990s stock. That is standard for a fragrance this old, given tightening restrictions on materials. Performance remains its calling card: eight hours and more is routine, projection is loud for the first two, and it survives on clothing for days. It has also spawned a large family of related releases, so check the exact name on the box.