The perfume for people who want to smell like sex

They might not be to everyone’s taste, but perfumes featuring the fragrant bouquet of saliva, blood, sweat and semen are seducing new customers with the promise of an original olfactory experience, and they’re created by a local guy.

Etienne de Swardt, who was born in South Africa, raised on a South Pacific island and today heads one of the most cutting-edge fragrance houses in France, said the fragrances in his range were “designed to literally smell like sex: blood, sweat, semen and saliva”.

As founder and president of Etat Libre d’Orange Parfums, De Swardt has drawn on his life’s experiences to create some of the most trendsetting and sexually suggestive fragrances, re-envisioning the very concept of what colognes and perfumes are meant to be.

Etienne de Swardt.

Perfumes are usually chosen for their woody, floral, citrusy and other agreeable scents, because no one in the right frame of mind would spend a small fortune on a fragrance named Crotch, I Am Trash or Hotel Slut – which are all in De Swardt’s range.

But then again, this South African expatriate is about as far from a normal perfumer as you could possibly hope to find.

“I wanted to take perfume on the road less travelled. I wanted to take a radical approach. The idea existed for a reason and, somehow, at the end, it is a perfume house,” he said in a recent interview with US-based Vice magazine.

Elaborating on the creative process behind Sécrétions Magnifiques (Magnificent Secretions), with its unmistakable under notes of semen, De Swardt said: “When I was a teen I was worried about the Aids crisis.

“Secretions Magnifiques is very connected to the ’80s and the viral risk. I thought about doing a perfume that would smell exactly like the situation, where you don’t know if you’re going for it, or if you’re protecting yourself from what you want.

“You are at the point between pornography and romanticism. You are lost between attraction and repulsion. It is a very dual perfume.”

Whether or not you fancy prancing around permeating your social circles with the unsettlingly avant-garde whiff of sperm, sweat or blood, De Swardt’s perfumes have certainly impressed international shoppers.

They are flying off the shelves at a cost of between €49 (R796) and €76 for 50ml.

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