Bringing Sexy Back

As intimacy declines and images dominate, a new wave of beauty brands are reclaiming the most sensorial experience of all — sex.

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We’re so used to sex selling beauty that we hardly blink when it happens, if we notice it at all. Full, parted lips, fluttery eyelashes, and the pertest of derrieres construct the fantasy that the “right” products will increase the users’ (usually women’s) sex appeal. Sex is hinted at, evoked, with little care or interest for whether it leads to consummation of any kind. “Better Than Sex,” said a standard black mascara from Too Faced; “Orgasm,” whispered a blusher shade from Nars, conjuring only a timid cheek flush.

A sex recession is upon us, with data reporting that younger generations are having less sex than their predecessors. Yet we don’t need data to say with confidence that we’re living in acutely looks-obsessed times, and that Zillennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha dedicate much time and resources to looking styled, perfected, and desirable; an investment in pleasures visual over bodily, an embrace of the controllable over the mutable. In other words, “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.” 

Amid this landscape – not quite neo-puritanism but more a flirtation with its features – a few beauty brands are making the case for sex again. More importantly, they’re doing so without the coy and saccharine trappings that saw a wink and a giggle as a good-enough substitute for the real thing. 

When the elevated bodycare range Nécessaire launched in 2018, the Sex Gel was part of the core offering. Presented in a minimalistic pump bottle and adorned in a cursive typeface, it announced itself and its use directly. Care for every part of your body, it seemed to say with utilitarian practicality. 

Body care brand Mienne took the idea a step further. French for mine, Mienne is interested in what is felt, not just what is seen, and incorporating this concept into the brand was essential. JR, Mienne’s marketing director, says, “Desire had to be part of it because we’re making products for the body. We’re interested in bodycare as ritual, something that brings you into presence. We wanted to create formulas and objects you’re drawn to using again and again: skin you want, scent you want, objects you want to keep close. That pull matters, it’s what makes care feel intuitive, not clinical.” 

For Mienne, desire has a dual meaning; the products are objects of desire, and they work to inspire and facilitate it in virtuous symbiosis. “Desire is both the aesthetic and the function. We design the packaging and the sensorial experience to feel covetable — high design, tactile, almost like you want to reach for it before you even know why. And then the product experience reinforces that: the texture, the scent, the finish on skin,” JR continues.

Mienne’s makers aren’t shying away from the kinds of acts that might follow the use of their products. “When skin looks transformed and feels inviting—when you’re more aware of your body—you tend to feel more open, more connected, more interested in touch. That’s the symbiosis: objects you desire, that make you feel more desirable, which naturally attracts desire from others,” JR says.

Alongside products like body wash, body cream, and a dual-purpose massage candle is the Sex Serum. The organically shaped bottle and round cap make it look like an objet d’art, while the travel size resides in a chrome bullet adorned with a leather tassel (or mini-flogger, depending on your disposition). Offering a lubricant “was always part of the plan,” says JR. “If we were building a brand around desire and touch, we couldn’t ignore the most intimate context for both—especially in a category that’s largely underserved in prestige skincare.” As for the name, it’s “direct because the intention is direct. We didn’t want euphemisms,” JR states.

No other fragrance has attended to the materiality of sex as closely as Secretions Magnifiques by Etat Libre d'Orange. The scent is an homage to sweat, saliva, blood, and sperm. I tried it once, many years ago (a sales assistant escorted me outside the shop to spritz on my wrist), and will never forget the saline, metallic, wet, musky experience. It’s a provocation few would dare wear. A subtler iteration is Pigmentarium’s Erotikon, inspired by Gustav Machatý’s 1929 silent film of the same name and its softness of images achieved through modern American lenses, which are translated into enveloping base notes of amber, musk, and sandalwood. Scandalousness is telegraphed via a heart of tonka beans and spicy, edible top notes: ginger, chocolate, pink pepper. The effect is a playful invitation to lean in a little closer. 

While many individual perfumes have flirted with sex and desire to inspire scent profiles, few brands have dared to base their modus operandi around them. When I discovered Jouissance and Discothèque last year, I was struck by how boldly both embedded sensory pleasures into every touchpoint. 

Jouissance’s connection to pleasure and the erotic is most direct, and underwriting it is a statement of intent: “Literary passions, distilled into scent.” The founder and creative director, Cherry Cheng, draws direct inspiration from female writers and thinkers who embraced their desires and helped others do the same. “I was drawn to female writers and thinkers who spoke openly about desire because they gave language to something that has so often been muted, distorted, or claimed by others. Their work didn’t treat desire as something to be apologised for, but as a source of intelligence, creativity, and power. That felt radical, and still does,” she says. The philosophy is inscribed in the brand name as jouissance, a term the French feminist writer Hélène Cixous used to discuss a particular form of pleasure interweaving spiritual, mental, and physical aspects unique to women. 

When creating Jouissance, Cheng “initially thought that the brand would be read as deliberately provocative and expected a degree of backlash.” The three scents in the range capture the writing of Catherine Millet (En Plein Air), Anaïs Nin (Les Cahiers Secrets), and Pauline Réage’s The Story of O (Bague d’O). Cheng says she was “ prepared for that tension,” especially since The Story of O and its depiction of total female submission have long been a subject of criticism in some feminist circles. Instead, what Cheng has seen is a response of “recognition rather than resistance” with customers describing the fragrances “as intimate, personal, even affirming – an invitation to reconnect with desire on their own terms. That reaction has clarified something essential for me: people aren’t rejecting the erotic itself. They’re rejecting reductive or externalised versions of it, and are gravitating toward more nuanced, reflective, and inward ways of experiencing desire.”

Discothèque locates its inspiration in some of history’s best clubs and unforgettable nights out. It pulses with references to the bodily, the pleasurable, and the possibilities unleashed in losing oneself on the dance floor. It’s unapologetically sexy and very much by design, according to founders Jessie Willner and Hanover Booth. “Fragrance is such an intimate experience: it lives on skin and is noticed at close range, to pretend it’s neutral or polite just doesn’t feel like Discothèque,” says Hanover of the decision to address desire directly. “The brand leans into that freeing feeling on the dance floor, where you feel most alive, a little undone, but completely yourself. Scent is incredibly evocative, and it can bypass logic or conscious thought and instantly transport you back to a memory. It’s physical and tactile and undeniably sexy.”

And Discothèque is having fun about it, too. Its scent sample pack looks like a cigarette packet, while individual 2ml samples are packaged to look indistinguishable from condom wrappers. (To be on the safe side when going out, I’d double-check you’re bringing the right one.) Willner didn’t think Discothèque would resonate with quite so many people, attributing the continued success to making and saying things “that others may only be thinking.”

“People want things that embrace and celebrate what can sometimes be the most inhibited parts of themselves, and the experiences we're inspired by are so universal, but sometimes taboo. Most mainstream brands would probably not have approved me designing a condom-wrapped 2ml sample or calling a fragrance Baise Moi on the Dancefloor. To think that these luxury retailers that we’ve partnered with have signed off on everything we've made is so special: we've been allowed to bring subversive design into the world of luxury, which is rare,” says Willner. It does feel subversive to see a fragrance brand state the quiet parts loudly. We wear perfume to smell good to those who get closest to us; clubs are sexy, intimate spaces where you might just find someone to baise, on the dancefloor or not.

Language is central to how Jouissance and Discothèque embody their positioning to embrace the sexy and the erotic. Cheng drew on Nin, Cixous, and Audre Lorde’s ideas about what desire can look like when it’s perceived as an open horizon, free of predetermined concepts and images. “These thinkers offered a framework where desire is not spectacle, but authorship. Jouissance grew from wanting to honour that lineage – creating fragrances that act as a personal language, inviting the wearer into a more conscious, sensual, and self-directed way of being,” explains Cheng. 

Every fragrance and candle by Discothèque comes complete with a sultry description courtesy of erotic short story writer Jessica Garrison, animating the scents with heady, aesthetic prose that delights the senses. It’s not product copy but a way to experience, albeit briefly, the scent world. Take Body Heat. It’s 1974 in Monte Carlo, and the wearer smells of cardamom and coffee to start before the fragrance shifts to reveal orris, suede, and dark chocolate, wearing down to an intimate base of amber, oud, and cedarwood. Garrison’s words ask us to imagine the encounter that took place. “Her amber eyes lingered, her palm on his arm. They were pressed between bodies, dripping in sweat and suede fringe. [...] Their wrists intertwined as they started to move. A tryst that began in a cedarwood booth on the French Riviera on a hot night in June. His hands grabbed her waist, his breath warm on her neck, like soft-burning sage. From first song to last, they danced through the night, their skin flush from a crush and marked with a bite.” Working with a range of references like music, scent notes, historical photos, and stories of clubs, Willner and Booth give Garrison an open brief to write what feels right. “Jessica has such a natural understanding of tension and restraint in her writing, and it's never literal; it captures those feelings you associate with the best nights out. It reads like a half-remembered moment you recognise instantly, even if you can’t name it,” adds Booth. 

Joussance closes the circle on its literary inspirations, commissioning and publishing the erotic short story publication, The Collector; a “natural extension [because] of the brand has always been about translation—exploring what can’t fully be expressed in a single medium,” Cheng explains. “The series, like our fragrances, seeks to explore the erotic in a way that is intimate, imaginative, and provocative, inviting conversation, reflection, and the reclaiming of desire as a creative force.”

Helena Whittingham, director at Lover Management, a talent agency specialising in intimacy and the erotic, has likewise observed the shift within the beauty industry, a step away from acting coy. “It’s genuinely encouraging to see beauty brands collaborating with sex workers and people who work directly with desire, like with the Urban Decay X Ari or Levi Coralynn's recent career, and not just borrowing from the aesthetics.” Whittingham sees this reflecting a wider newfound appetite “for the physical and the sensorial right now, especially after years of digital fatigue and emotional distance. Sex has always sold, but what feels different in this moment is the confidence. There’s a sense of desire being treated as adult, embodied, and worth taking seriously, which I hope signals a pushback against the neo-puritanism we’ve seen creeping into culture. I basically live to see it! love seeing sex-positive brands and sex workers crossing into beauty and fragrance – when it feels like bridge-building rather than just branding.”

“I think what we’re seeing isn’t an absence of desire, but a discomfort with how narrowly it’s been represented,” reflects Cheng. For too long, narratives about sex and desire were defined externally and disseminated through images that created a normative effect. None of the brands mentioned here deal in stereotypically sexy imagery to elicit their desired effect. Products are presented either with a degree of utilitarianism (Nécessaire) or sensuality. Jouissance’s few images of bodies appear illustrative, not prescriptive, while Discothèque insists on a sense of fun and play in a few promo images featuring a real-life couple. What desire is, what sex means, and how pleasure is defined are left for us to figure out. 

“There’s a fatigue around performative or commodified sexuality, which can look like neo-puritanism on the surface,” says Cheng. “But beneath that, I think the desire for intimacy, meaning, and embodied experience is very much alive.” 🌀

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Zhenya Tsenzharyk is a writer and editor living in London, covering (most) things sensory through a culturally critical lens. She loves to over-intellectualise her ever-growing perfume collection.