Hot Girls Read Anaïs Nin (And Now They Can Smell Like Her Too)

Since the beginning of time (a.k.a. the ’90s), fragrance marketing has had one main promise, and that was to capture desire in a bottle: hot, steamy pheromones with the power to attract and seduce, and gain you aura while doing so. Reality proves that sex-inspired perfumes smell like peaches and do absolutely nothing for you or the person you want to attract.

However, let us introduce you to JOUISSANCE Parfums. Technically, these are perfumes about sex. But not the sweaty club groping and “for him” / “for her” binaries we’re so used to seeing. JOUISSANCE is based on the intimate type of sex stories only your diary knows, the type that has historically provoked controversy and even obscenity trials. No supermarket paperback fantasy or fanfiction smut here. It’s based on the forbidden literary gold. Desire as told by women, for women. Their scents are an homage to classic literary exhibitionism, musings from extraordinary women’s interior lives, literature, fantasy, solitude… which, frankly, is hotter. 

Because desire, real desire, is often better alone. It is sometimes embarrassing, something meant to be enjoyed in private. JOUISSANCE understands this. The entire project starts, very simply, with the voyeuristic, curious question: what would these literary women’s worlds smell like? Women like Anaïs Nin, romanticising their affairs, feverishly writing about their daily enjoyments in cafés and in bed. Women like Catherine Millet, coolly documenting orgies and jealousy with the same intellectual rigor. Women like Pauline Réage, turning submission into something controlled.

The name alone is doing a lot of work. JOUISSANCE—not just pleasure, but excess pleasure. Hélène Cixous calls it an erotic, almost mystical surplus, one that the founder, Cherry Cheng, says only women have the capacity to experience. Already, we’re far from ‘man in linen blouse groping you in the club’ territory!!! 

The perfumes themselves, rounded, vintage-looking flacons nestled in pink satin, housed in rose-coloured, gold-embossed boxes, ooze femininity, nostalgia, and romance. But the compositions resist merely being soft. One fragrance opens with citrus—bright, almost naïve—and then slices through itself with metallic aldehydes. It’s inspired by Histoire d’O – the controversial story that led to national debate in France, follows a woman who is willingly taken to a château where she undergoes training to become an object of pleasure, and explicitly goes into BDSM details. In the film, she was shackled with steel chains, hence the metals, a gentle reminder of the taste of O-rings for your daily commute.

Another one is based on the original literary it-girl, Anais Nin. It’s inspired by the perfume houses of the 1930s, when Nin lived, like Caron and Guerlain. It leans powdery, nostalgic—iris, soft rose, amber—but then there’s cumin? Yes, it smells like body odor; some people even comment that it smells like their vagina (in a good way). After your brain does some somersaults, it will reconsider your entire relationship to “clean.”  Cherry basically admits as much: you start with something beautiful, then you defile it. 

The best part here is that she approaches fragrance as a feminist practice. Brands creating perfumes for women promise that their candied scents will ‘distract’ men into falling for them, a rather patronizing approach. But JOUISSANCE presents itself as an erotic syllabus and an IRL experience of the words that make you desire the pleasures of the flesh. More than perfume alone, they offer a secret library of rare erotic texts, a collective journal where you can literally submit your own private diary entries. They host salons, dinners, and screenings, inviting engagement with desire as something authored and shared, existing beyond the male gaze without denying its presence. And they have scented bookmarks (obsessed). 

JOUISSANCE makes you curious. If you too, aren’t sure you can fathom another ad with a whispered desire, one more man gripping a woman like she’s the male equivalent of a Birkin, try to discover the JOUISSANCE world. JOUISSANCE’s perfumes make you enter scenarios, micro-narratives: a dungeon, a Parisian bedroom, a secret rendezvous, all distilled into something portable. JOUISSANCE is elegant, subversive, sincere, and it approaches sex without clichés. It’s PASSIONATE about PASSION. Which sounds a bit corny, until you realise…why isn’t everything?