Signature in the Air: Some Men Wear One Scent for Life

A 56-year-old architect in Jakarta, Danardono Mandagi, has worn the same woody, faintly smoky scent since 1994. He bought his first bottle the week his firm won its first commission. “I couldn’t really afford it,” he says. “But I had spent years not being able to afford anything, and I wanted to mark the moment with something that wasn’t a signature on a contract.” Three decades on, the scent has become inseparable from the man. His daughter once told him she could find him in a crowded room with her eyes closed. “That’s not vanity,” he says. “That’s presence. There is a version of me that exists in other people’s memories, and it smells like this.”

The idea that a fragrance becomes a kind of personal signature, written in the air rather than on paper, recurs again and again among men who have stayed loyal to one scent, wherever in the world you find them. It’s less about how the fragrance smells, they will tell you, and more about what it has come to mean.

For Martim Costa Guerreiro, a 34-year-old carpenter in Lisbon, the meaning is inherited. The crisp, citrus-and-cedar scent he wears belonged first to his father, who wore it every Sunday and on no other day. “It was his signal that the week was over,” Martim remembers. “Lunch stretching into the afternoon, football on the radio, and that smell.” When his father died six years ago, Martim found a half-finished bottle on the bathroom shelf. He couldn’t bring himself to throw it away, and eventually he couldn’t bring himself not to wear it. “People talk about keeping someone’s memory alive. I don’t have to try. He turns up every morning when I get dressed.” He laughs, then adds, more quietly: “Although I wear it on weekdays too. He would have thought that was decadent.”

If Martim’s loyalty is an act of remembrance, for others it’s an act of self-definition. A decision made young that hardened into identity. Imoto Senji, 71, a retired physician in Kyoto, chose his fragrance in 1979, during a year spent studying abroad. “Everything about me was in flux,” he says. “New country, new language expected of me, new everything. I wanted one thing that would not change.” He chose a classic, faintly old-fashioned eau de cologne, the kind his own grandfather might have recognised, and has worn it through marriage, fatherhood, four decades of practice and now retirement. “Patients used to say the clinic smelled reassuring,” Senji says. “I never told them it was just me.”

There is something in this that resists the modern logic of consumption. The fragrance industry, like fashion, runs on the promise of reinvention. That the next bottle will make you bolder, fresher, more desirable. The men of one scent have opted out of that conversation entirely. For them, fragrance is not aspiration but anchor.

Colin Vance, a 42-year-old music producer in Toronto, frames it as a matter of confidence. He settled on his scent at 25, after what he describes as “years of smelling like whoever I was trying to be that month”. Green, sharp, a little austere. The decision to stop experimenting, he says, coincided with the decision to stop performing. “When you wear the same thing every day, it stops being a statement and starts being a fact. I don’t think about it any more than I think about my own name. And there’s a freedom in that. One less question every morning.”

That word, routine, comes up often, though never with the dullness it usually implies. For these men, the daily ritual of fragrance is closer to ceremony: a small, private moment of order before the day begins. Darcy Nguyen, a 27-year-old junior doctor in Melbourne and the youngest of the men interviewed here, discovered this during the chaos of his intern years. “Twelve-hour shifts, night rotations, no control over anything,” Darcy says. “But every morning, or whatever counted as morning, there were thirty seconds that were exactly the same. It sounds trivial. It wasn’t.” He has worn the same soft, ambery scent since his first week on the wards. He suspects he always will. “I’ve already had the moments in it now. First shift. First loss. The day I proposed. It’s load-bearing.”

Load-bearing is, perhaps, the right phrase. Scent is famously the sense most directly wired to memory, bypassing language and landing straight in feeling. The men who wear one fragrance for life are, knowingly or not, building an archive. Layering year upon year into a single smell until it holds everything. A new fragrance, by contrast, holds nothing yet. Switching would mean starting the archive again from zero and most of them find the idea faintly absurd.

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Not that loyalty is always solemn. Danardono, the architect, admits his scent has been discontinued and reformulated twice, sending him on undignified hunts through airport duty-free shops and online auctions. “I have a small stockpile,” he confesses. “My wife calls it the pension fund.” Senji, meanwhile, was once given a fashionable new fragrance by his grandchildren for his sixty-fifth birthday. He wore it precisely once. “A lovely thing,” he says diplomatically. “But I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise the smell of the man looking back.”

And perhaps that is the heart of it. In a culture where identity is endlessly editable, a signature scent is one of the few things a man can wear that genuinely accumulates rather than expires. It gathers his weddings and funerals, his first jobs and last days, his fathers and daughters, and gives them all back to him each morning in a single breath. The details differ from Jakarta to Lisbon to Kyoto, but the instinct is the same everywhere: hold on to the one thing that holds on to everything else.

“People ask if I get bored of it,” says Martim, the carpenter, pulling on his jacket at the end of our conversation. “But you don’t get bored of your own handwriting, do you? It’s just how I sign things now.” He pauses at the door, and the air moves, and there it is. Cedar and citrus, a Sunday in Lisbon, a father and a son. “Including the days.”