Unisex Fragrances for Work: Seven Niche Perfumes and the Arm's-Length Rule

Late morning on an open-plan floor, radiators ticking, a dozen coffees going cold beside a dozen keyboards. A colleague leans over your shoulder to point at a figure on your screen, and for the length of that lean there is grapefruit, a scrape of fresh ginger, the bright oil that spits from a bent orange peel. Then they straighten up and walk back to their desk, and the grapefruit stays where it was, on you.

That is the craft of wearing perfume to work: a scent for the person who leans in, gone before the next desk, whatever counter the bottle was sold from. An anthropologist put a number on that distance in the 1960s, and it is the yardstick for the seven niche perfumes below.

Two and a half to four feet

In The Hidden Dimension, in 1966, Edward T. Hall drew the space around a body as a set of rings. The one he called the far phase of personal distance runs from two and a half to four feet, from just beyond easy touch to the point where two people can meet fingertips with both arms stretched out. Keeping someone at arm's length, he wrote, is one way of expressing it.

At that distance, smell was not normally present for the Americans Hall studied, but it was for a great many other people, who use colognes to create an "olfactory bubble". People who work together tend to keep one ring further out, at four to seven feet. At seven to twelve feet none of his subjects mentioned heat or odour from another person's body as detectable, and even across a standard office desk the chair opposite is eight or nine feet away.

Those were middle-class Americans of the 1960s, and Hall saw the rings shift with temperament and setting. Still, an open-plan floor fits the map: the colleague leaning over your screen is at arm's length, where a cologne wearer's bubble ends, and the next desk sits just past it.

The last nose to know

The French word for a perfume's trail first meant the foaming wake a ship cuts across the water. A wake is seen from behind, by everyone but the ship.

Noses share the ship's blind spot. Repeated or prolonged exposure to a smell lowers sensitivity to that smell, and it returns only after time away. At the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, people lived with one test odour in their homes for two weeks, and for most of them sensitivity to it was still reduced up to two weeks after it was taken away. Wear the same scent every working day and your own nose learns to turn it down.

Nobody at the office agreed to smell you, and plenty would rather not. In a 2016 survey of 1,136 American adults, over half said they would prefer fragrance-free workplaces, and 15.1 per cent had lost workdays or a job over fragranced products at work, cleaners and air fresheners included.

A detox juice in Beverly Hills

Fresh ginger zest is stirred into grapefruit, bergamot and orange, and the rind cracks open on a round, fruity citrus with a ginger bite. It is one of Les Extraits, five highly concentrated perfumes Jacques Cavallier Belletrud made for Louis Vuitton and poured into Frank Gehry's first perfume bottle, Marc Newson's flacon stretched into curves. Louis Vuitton wrote it for a dazzling trail, so at work it gets one spray on skin before leaving home, and the opening, the shortest-lived part of any perfume, has passed before anyone is near.

It began at brunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Cavallier Belletrud and the artist Alex Israel drank a detox juice of fresh carrot, ginger and squeezed orange, and he told Israel he would make a detox cologne. Israel painted the artwork for its case. What came of it is blackcurrant and cédrat with basil seeds and peppermint, fruity and bright as the first glass of the day. It is the only cologne on this list, the one for a nine o'clock meeting in a room whose windows do not open.

Filed under men, worn by anyone

Their own houses file three of these perfumes under men, Symphony and Valaya under women and Pacific Chill under both, and Floraïku tags Sand and Skin for her and for him. An office sorts people along other lines, near desk or far desk, open floor or a door that shuts.

Creed released it in 1985, and it smells like a lawn cut early and still wet at the edges, peppermint and galbanum over violet and oakmoss. Nothing in it needs a man to wear it. Creed's instructions ask for two to four sprays at the pulse points; at a desk with a neighbour on each side, stay at the bottom of that range.

Valaya started from clothing, the petticoat worn under eighteenth-century dress or a white shirt against the skin. Mandarin and white peach come first, then orange blossom, and it settles into white musk and vanilla like a veil of linen, warmed by whoever is inside it.

Stéphanie Bakouche made one perfume for MDCI, and this is it, first called SB-1. Violet leaves and grapefruit open it cold and green. Then it smells of the barber's chair after a clean shave, lavender and thyme on warm skin, with vanilla softening the patchouli underneath.

The number in the name

Amouage writes the dose into the names of its Exceptional Extraits: Decision 42 is 42 per cent perfume oil, Epic 56 is 56. Reflection 45 reinterprets Reflection Man, an eau de parfum at 25 per cent, at 45 per cent and with a new spicy top. More oil means less alcohol and, usually, a longer-lasting scent, though the effect varies with the formula. The labels that run from eau de parfum to extrait are names for that ratio, so the 45 says how much perfume is in the bottle and nothing about how many sprays a shared room can take.

Lucas Sieuzac composed it, and its first batch was aged sixteen weeks in Oman. Lavender and clary sage open it with a cold flash of juniper berry, and the myrrh and frankincense underneath are saved for whoever is still close by at the end of the day.

Sun-warmed resin

Floraïku names each perfume after a haiku and keeps each formula short. Sand and Skin rests on Madagascar vanilla absolute and benzoin with a fraction of ylang-ylang, over the sandalwood that grows mostly wild in Western Australia. The perfumer pictured benzoin heated by the sun and black vanilla pods on a remote island.

The colleague who bends to point at your screen catches sun-warmed resin and vanilla, then straightens, walks back past the edge of Hall's ring to a desk across the floor, and sits down among the cold coffee.

Frequently asked questions

How many sprays of perfume should you wear to the office?

Fewer than for an evening out, applied on skin at home rather than at the desk. Creed's own instructions for Green Irish Tweed ask for two to four sprays at the pulse points; in a shared room, the bottom of any such range is the safer choice.

Why can't I smell my own perfume at work?

Repeated or prolonged exposure to a smell lowers your sensitivity to that particular smell, and it recovers only after time away from it. So the wearer is a poor judge of how strong a perfume still is, which is a reason not to spray again at the desk.

Can a man wear a perfume sold for women at the office, or the other way round?

Yes. Parfums de Marly keeps Valaya in its women's collection and Creed sells Green Irish Tweed as a men's fragrance, yet one is citrus, white flowers and musk and the other citrus, herbs, flowers and woods, and anyone can wear either. In a shared room, how far a scent reaches matters more than which shelf it came from.