A post on X asking for perfume recommendations to “smell like a French whore” recently went viral, garnering 50,000 likes and a flood of replies suggesting perfumes heavy with animalic notes and overpowering florals. While provocative, the idea isn’t new. The link between scent and sex work runs deep. In A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman notes how many slang terms for sex worker – like the French putain and Italian puttana – derive from the root pu, meaning “to rot” or “decay” (as in putrid), reflecting a long history of associating sex workers’ bodies with foul odours. 

In Ancient Rome, brothels, or lupanaria (“wolf dens”) were sensorially overwhelming: cramped, poorly ventilated, the air thick with smoke from oil lamps, mingling with sweat and naked bodies. The Roman writer Juvenal remarked how the brothel’s soot and stench clung to a woman, implying a dirtying of both body and reputation. Courtesans were reportedly gifted perfumes as part payment, and heavy scents and pungent cosmetics came to signal promiscuity: Juvenal claimed women bought perfumes with adultery in mind. 

These moralistic (and misogynistic) tropes follow a pattern we see throughout history. Sex workers are portrayed as “reeking,” either through foulness – sweaty, diseased, animalistic – or excessive perfume. The former disgusts, the latter deceives. Perfume is read as a tool of seductive trickery, a weapon, implying the sex worker is “masking” her supposed immorality, which “respectable” society prides itself on sniffing out. Class shapes this too: upper-class women are often described through metaphors of light, fresh, florals; while working-class women, like market sellers, laundresses and sex workers, remain tied to the earthy, corporeal scents of labour and urban life. A similar logic played out in colonial contexts: people of colour were often branded inherently ‘odorous,’ and primitive, even as the aromatic oils, spices and resins of their homelands were fetishised as exotic luxuries. Both representations contributed to the eroticisation of the ‘other’ in the colonial imagination. Odour marks – and enforces – hierarchies of class, gender and race.

Much of this obsession with assigning morality to smell can be traced back to miasma theory. Before germs were understood, diseases like the plague were thought to spread through foul vapours rising from rot and filth. Certain scents were seen not just as unpleasant, but as direct threats to health and social order. For protection, people turned to pleasant smells: scented waters, ornate pomanders and posies of herbs. When syphilis swept into Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, anxieties about bodily contamination intensified. Brothels were seen as hotbeds of infection, and sex workers were judged not only as carriers of disease but as symbols of moral decay: their odours contrasted with the saintly sweetness of virtuous women, their bodies conflated with sewers and waste, vessels for society’s sins.

By the 19th century, industrial cities swelled with people, their streets heavy with the stench of leaking drains, stagnant waste and overburdened sewers. Sex workers, increasingly visible in these streets, had their bodies entwined in symbolic associations of urban filth and moral corruption in literature, reform writing and police discourse. These anxieties were codified in hygiene regulations, which subjected suspected sex workers (but not their clients) to invasive medical examinations. Even after germ theory displaced miasma theory, cultural associations among smell, danger and female sexuality endured.

The luxury brothels of late 19th-century Paris – maisons tolérées – were often portrayed as decadent theatres of the senses: their allure shadowed by the threat such excesses might seep into the streets and corrupt public life. Accounts recall the gilded opulence of famed houses like Le Sphinx and Le Chabanais – each chamber themed to a different fantasy – heavy with the smell of incense, tobacco, Turkish rose, opium smoke, hair oil, soap and Arabian spices. Whether fact or fantasy, these portrayals conjured a sensual, exoticised mythology of the Belle Époque brothel that lingered in the artistic imagination, inspiring artists from Toulouse Lautrec to the Surrealists. Decades later, perfumers such as Jean Carles would echo these fantasies in fragrances like Tabu (1931), a dense blend of patchouli, musk and spices rumoured to be designed to “smell like a whore,” and later Schiaparelli’s Shocking (1937), a voluptuous, spicy amber-floral with civet notes, since compared to the intimate scent of a woman’s knickers. The sex workers at the brothels, meanwhile, were often described far less romantically; routinely subject to strict bathing regimes and inspections. When reformers eventually called for the closure of the brothels, they drew on the same language of hygiene and sensory excess to justify their intervention.

Nearly a century later, these contradictory tropes persist, even as sex work increasingly moves online. On TikTok, recommendations range from “perfumes to smell like the most adored courtesan in Paris” (think powdery iris and violet), to “perfumes to attract a sugar daddy” (predictably youthful, candy-sweet, milky gourmands). On a practical level, on “304Tok”, former sex workers share elaborate hygiene routines to smell ‘cleaner’, from yoni steaming to portable bidets and prebiotic intimate sprays. There’s an undercurrent of respectability politics at play – an effort to prove one’s cleanliness in a society that so often calls it into question.

Yet the policing of women’s bodies through odour-based insults also continues. On X, comments under OnlyFans models sneer, “imagine the smell,” while the taunt “BBL stink” elicits disgust through evoking the sharp tang of post-surgical infection. Fragrantica reviews may dismiss certain perfumes as smelling like “a whore’s drawers”, but elsewhere, niche perfume houses play on this tension, bottling up the scented fantasy of sex work that continues to fascinate civilian audiences. Putain de Palaces by État Libre d’Orange evokes the high-class temptress lingering in a hotel bar; WH*RE by Marissa Zappas draws on Liara Roux’s memoir of escorting in New York. The association between sex work and heavy fragrance has not only endured but been reimagined and commodified.

The sex worker’s body occupies a contradictory space in today’s culture, caught between the “foul” and the “fragrant,” and constantly dragged back to an imagined “truth” of her body. Focusing on scent allows moral discomfort about sex work to masquerade as a physical reaction, turning her body into a target for socially acceptable disgust. Reducing a woman to smell alone dehumanises her, rendering her a mere object of bodily function. She is framed as an abject body – porous, leaking, contaminating – yet her scent is also a site of fantasy, one that is persistently met with suspicion. Media and brands exploit this tension, sensationalising and profiting from the fantasy of “smelling like a whore” while rarely challenging the stigma. By continually marking sex workers as “other,” society enforces a prejudice with real consequences for their lives. In the end, it is not sex work, but society’s attitude toward it that truly stinks.

At the author’s request, a portion of the fees for this article was donated to National Ugly Mugs, a charity that supports sex workers’ safety and works to end violence against them.