Jouissance Makes Filthy Perfume For Sexy Intellectuals (EXCLUSIVE)
Perfume makes you sexier. It’s a conjecture that’s served as the basis for fragrance advertising throughout history. Think of the shirtless hunks in Davidoff’s Cool Water campaigns, a nude Charlize Theron peddling Dior’s J’adore, or the bronzed breasts featured in the ad for Tom Ford’s first men’s fragrance. For decades, perfume has been advertised, and put to use, as a tool of seduction.
There is, indeed, something inherently sensual about perfume. It becomes one with the skin. Sometimes, it has superpower-like effects, lending its wearer more confidence (that, in itself, can be very sexy). There’s nothing wrong with perfume’s link to desire, but the showy, hypersexual messaging in fragrance advertising has become a meme-y trope that young people aren’t buying.
Luckily, a new brand is taking a more nuanced approach to scent and sensuality. Enter: Jouissance, whose debut perfumes are inspired by erotic literature.
Cherry Cheng, an academic with a background in history and theory of fine arts, became fascinated with scent at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though she herself didn’t suffer COVID-related anosmia, a temporary loss of smell that can manifest as a symptom of the virus, she heard horror stories from friends who experienced it.
“They [felt] like they were outside their own life, watching it unfold through a porthole,” she tells Highsnobiety. “Fragrances are important to our lives because they keep us human, make us aware of our bodies, and endow us with memories and emotions while we experience their momentary beauty.”
Scent has a near-mystical power to touch both our bodies and our minds, a realization that pushed Cheng to found Jouissance in 2022. The brand takes its name from a French term, first coined by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, loosely defined as the simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain. Later, feminist theorist Hélène Cixous used jouissance to describe a form of pleasure so powerful that it transcends a physical sensation.
Jouissance, in the theoretical sense, aptly describes what it feels like to experience the creations of Jouissance, the brand. Les Cahiers Secrets, based on the writings of Anaïs Nin, is, at open, so vulgar you can’t stop sniffing it. Powdery orris and fresh lilies are rudely interspersed with whiffs of sweaty cumin and animalic musk. It’s clean and dirty, gorgeous and sordid all at once.
La Bague D’O, an interpretation of Paule Réage’s erotic novel Story of O, similarly balances repulsion and pleasure. A bouquet of rose, geranium, and jasmine is juxtaposed against dark, earthy notes of patchouli and castoreum, a stinky secretion from a beaver’s anal glands (these days, perfumers no longer source castoreum from living animals — instead, they recreate the smell using synthetic fragrance molecules).
If you’re not quite ready to don cumin and castoreum, fear not. There’s also En Plein Air, a bright, citrus scent with a salacious backstory. Inspired by writer Catherine Millet, who recounts her sexual exploits in memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M, the fragrance is meant to evoke the hedonism of al fresco romps.
Cheng hasn’t crafted these filthily spectacular fragrances for shock value — it’s deeper than that. “The fundamental link between perfume and eroticism lies in a basic urge: the longing to return to one’s body, to reconnect with the physical self.”
Just as Cixous’ writings encouraged women to discover and embrace their own jouissance, Cheng hopes her perfumes, which launch online on June 19, will inspire a lust for life in wearers. “It’s about the yearning to experience more deeply, to create more passionately, and to unravel the myriad contractions and complexities within oneself.”
