Over 800 people (so far) have commented on my TikTok asking bisexuals what perfumes they like. I’ve been through all the comments and complied some tables and graphs that show what perfume notes and categories bisexual TikTok users told me they liked.
The background to this is that I posted some TikToks looking at what polls and some scientific research said what different groups of people said what perfumes they found most attractive (the posts were around valentines day). I looked at heterosexual women and men, gay men and lesbians. The post on lesbian preference got a huge response and a large number of TikTok users told me what they liked. I took these data, did a little analysis and complied some graphs. All the results can be seen on my page Lesbian perfume tribes.
In addition to Lesbians telling me about their preference I got a huge number of bisexuals to say ‘what about us’, so I asked the community what perfumes they like are and here are the results.
People commented on the TikTok in two main ways: either saying the specific perfume notes they liked or stating the general type of smell. As TikTok responses are free text and I did not run a survey it means that there was a wide range of individual smells that people mentioned. In fact, there were about 120 individual notes and over 50 categories. These ranged from the general ‘flowery’ to the extremely specific such as ‘chainsaw grease’.
Bi-Tribes
Generally speaking, the results were that the bisexuals who responded were less tribal than the lesbians who responded to an earlier TikTok. If pushed I would say that two groups emerged but as I note below there’s overlap between these and they cross fragrance categories – in short the bisexual preference were very diverse.
Wood, Woodsy and Nature
Quite a few people identified smells relating to nature in some way. These included ‘woods’ where sandalwood and Cedar were the most popular. Also, ‘woodsy’ which some people went on to clarify was about soil or forest floor or even mossy. There were also references to the smell of a hike.
If we look at the way perfumes are categorised these smells fall into a range of categories. The sense I got from the narrative in the comments was that the common thread was something that reminded people of or rooted them to nature.
Fresh
The ‘fresh’ group identified ‘clean’ smells like laundry, linen of cotton. I would also include in this group those that mentioned things like sea spray or the ocean. I think some would probably include woods into this category as for many the idea of a pure wood smell is a clean smell – which is indicative of how difficult it is to really summarise these results into a small number of categories.
Top 20 Notes
The table below ranks the individual notes that people mentioned as a per cent of all notes mentioned (rather than all responses). There were over 120 individual notes or smells mentioned in the comments so the results have a very long tale. Favourites were Vanilla, Lavender, Sandalwood and Cedar. In fragrance category terms: oriental, wood, and floral. However it is interesting that the the notes that got the highest number of references only got 8% and in almost all cases the single note was included in a list which might include complementary or completely contrasting notes.
| Vanilla | 8% |
| Lavinder | 8% |
| Sandalwood | 6% |
| Cedar | 6% |
| Bergamot | 3% |
| Jasmine | 3% |
| Rose | 3% |
| Amber | 3% |
| Tobacco (humidified cigar) | 3% |
| Leather | 2% |
| Mint | 2% |
| Patchouli | 2% |
| Musk | 2% |
| Sea / Ocean (salt, spray etc) | 2% |
| Laundry (linen, fabric softner, fresh | 2% |
All notes mentioned – by perfume category
Top 10 (ish*) Fragrance Categories
The results for fragrance categories, and here these are based on what people described rather than a formal categorisation, are slightly different from the individual notes as there are fewer categories to choose from hence the % are higher for individual categories. That is, there were a total of just over 50 categories mentioned as opposed to over 120 notes, so each mention of a category counts (in the list below) more than twice as highly as a note.
Here the top results seem to follow trends of the general population. That is, some studies show that the fragrance category that most people like to some degree is citrus – its the middle of the road category. Florals, woods etc are also very popular and looking at any set of big-name fragrances you will see these well represented.
Also, we see a correlation between the individual ‘wood’ notes above and woods and woodsy been mentioned here.
Another interesting correlation is between the individual notes above and the ‘nature’ or ‘natural’ themes of the smell of the body or decomposing leaves (*I’ve added the ‘ish to the title as these can be seen as one group).
| Citrus | 15% |
| Floral | 10% |
| Woodsy | 8% |
| Earthy (sandalwood) | 6% |
| Fruit | 6% |
| Musky | 4% |
| Herbal | 3% |
| Spice | 3% |
| Natural Person | 2% |
| Woody | 2% |
| Earthy (decomposing leaves) | 2% |
All categories mentioned
5 Most Disliked Fragrances
In addition to saying what they liked, a few of the bisexuals that responded to my TikTok also stated the fragrances they don’t like. The top, or is it bottom, 5 are as follows.
| Sweet | 1% |
| Patchouli | 1% |
| Floral | 1% |
| Powdery | 1% |
| Vanilla | 1% |