4 Easy Scents to Show Your Seductive Side

Perfumers and women’s magazines recommend adding fragrance to a woman’s arsenal in her campaign to get the man she wants. The key, they say, is in a scent’s aphrodisiac qualities. Those qualities stimulate the brain’s limbic system which is involved in emotion and memory. 

According to Dana Koh’s article, “Pleasure Piques: Sensual, Seductive Scents that Arouse Without a Single Touch,” published in Vogue: “sensuality and seduction are core emotions for fragrances. Indeed, sexual arousal is controlled by a primitive structure in the brain, linked to the limbic system, that is highly connected to the sense of smell.” 

Although most fragrances are developed by men and formulated for women, most of the same scents that men find sexy on women are the same scents women find sexy on men. That stems from what women’s magazine Cosmopolitan asserts as the power of convention. Convention mostly determines what we find attractive, because that’s what we expect.

There’s a lot of research on the topic of what a man finds sexually stimulating. Not all that surprisingly, most floral scents don’t make the top of that list with one notable exception: lily of the valley. Beauty Insider reported the results of a scientific study revealing that “11% of men found this delicate scent very ‘stimulating.’” The scent itself is “rare and expensive.” Other florals men find alluring are jasmine and lavender.

There’s a lot to the old saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Mouthwatering scents bring to mind the intersection between oral pleasure and sexual pleasure. The heavy hitter in gourmand scents is vanilla. The warm, familiar scent of vanilla in particular “stimulates sexual arousal in men,” states Bee Shapiro, founder of Ellis Brooklyn. Vanilla invites seduction by drawing a romantic partner closer to that rich, yummy smell. History corroborates science: in the 1700s, “physicians recommended it to male patients to ensure potency,” say writers Aly Walansky, Macy Daniela Martin, and Diana V. writing for Your Tango.

Continuing the gourmand theme is pumpkin pie. The ingredients of pumpkin pie spice—cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and allspice—have become a hallmark of all things autumn, combining stomach-related pleasure with the exotic allure of the Orient. The peppery component of ginger stimulates and is commonly used in Asian herbal tonics to improve an aging man’s libido. Women enjoy the sweetness and allure of cinnamon.

Musk, originally extracted from Tibetan musk deer or civets, adds that dirty, animalistic note reminiscent of animals and the hairy regions of the human body. Musk is “earthy, woody, and intoxicating” and smells different on each person. “Basically, musk smells like sex,” writes Faith Xue in her article “The Most Seductive Scents, As Proven by Science.”

The scents listed above also stimulate a woman’s libido; however, in a departure from mens’ preferences, the fresh, invigorating scent of peppermint has been proven to help women achieve multiple orgasms. 

Find or concoct the most seductive fragrance to please you and your romantic partner at Paula Howard Essentials.