01Premise
While smelling perfumes, I realized that there are many fragrances that attempt to achieve the olfactory profile equivalent to sunscreen with their formulation. It is a pretty interesting niche, for reasons I will go into detail at the end; as the point of this theory is to make a way to categorize fragrances that fall into this category.
There are three specific characteristics in the context of sunscreen fragrances that can be used to categorize them: how feminine it is, how impersonal/inoffensive it is, and how true to summer it is. Let me explain them:
The effeminate sunscreen is one which is characterized by subtle sweetness, either of fruit or flower (and sometimes more rarely vanilla), and would be the type of smell that pretty girl who is always near water, but seldom goes in.
The impersonal and inoffensive sunscreen is one which is uncharacteristic. It is the one that comes closest to smelling like true branded sunscreen. You walk into a pharmacy, go to the sunscreen section, close your eyes, point at random and then buy it; chances are it will smell like a fragrance that belongs into this category.
The true-to-the-summer sunscreen fragrance is one which captures either that sweaty facet of people who play beach volleyball at the edge of the sea, or that aquatic facet that is salty but more so from the salt of the water rather than sweat.
02The framework
The best way I thought to represent the three former characteristics visually is in a triangle, where each of the poles of it would correspond to one of the descriptions. My reasoning for this is that this framework considers each of the characteristics to be the extremes on the same 3-way spectrum.
03Examples
The first fragrance I would like to explore is French Riviera by Mancera. It is powdery, salty, sunscreen-esque and definitely containing ambroxide, which is likely the reason why it is sweaty in the first place. This is a sunscreen you might smell on the boys who who play sports on the French Riviera. This perfume belongs here:
The second fragrance I would like to use as an example is Soleil De Provence by L’Artisan Parfumeur. It simply smells like sunscreen. It takes away some of the chemical character that storebought sunscreen might have in its scent profile, but asides from making it more refined, L’Artisan Parfumeur did very little to give this fragrance any individual character; and for that reason it belongs here:
The third fragrance is Sunkissed Goddess by Kilian. It is a fragrance that is floral and milky, in addition to its sunscreen-esque-ness. It contains a hint of citruses, which combine with white florals like tiare, tuberose and jasmine (giving it that feminine allure); it also contains some coconut and vanilla, made smoother by the addition of ylang ylang (a component that makes anything smell smooth and very well put together) that makes it more akin to body milk than sunscreen. For the reasons given, I would put it here:
04Nuances
The main assumption that the model has been applying so far is that all fragrances are linear; and although many sunscreen fragrances I would consider to be more linear than not, this does not apply to all of them. A nearly perfectly linear fragrance might be French Riviera, or Sunkissed Goddess; but fragrances like Soleil Blanc by Tom Ford are by no means linear.
Soleil Blanc is a sunscreen fragrance that starts out relatively in the middle of indifferent sunscreen and effeminate, as aside from its general sunscreen character, you can make out traces of stuff that tries to make it more appealing. However, as time progresses, the latter facets become more prominent and so you start having a character that contains obvious traces of tuberose, ylang ylang and coconut (although to a lesser extent when compared to Sunkissed Goddess in my opinion). So in the following triangle, you can see that despite it starting out somewhere (SB1), it ended up elsewhere (SB2) via its development.
05The Charm of Sunscreen Fragrances
I admit it is quite an interesting niche to explore, because it is just one of those things that a person does not think about when they think about perfume. Honestly, that is why I find it so alluring. If you imagine a person smelling good, most of the time that inference comes from the fact that they are wearing perfume — a fact that you are quite aware of when you recognize it — as noone really smells like oud nor maracuja on their own. However, a sunscreen fragrance that has a character of smelling good besides just being sunscreen-esque will leave the impression that the person smelling good isn’t really trying to smell good, and they just inherently do. That is a great way to go about smell, because there is a certain charm to this nonchalance.
In my mind, I would equate this to the “je ne sais quoi” or “Spazzatura” vibe that is more often than not used in the context of clothing to express a person who conveys a unattempted success in a certain field (or in general).