What Does A Cowboy Smell Like?

Notes on bottling and selling the West.

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Helplessly, we dream of cowboys — the Westernwear trend of the early 2020s is well-trod thinkpiece territory by now. In the wake of this trend, as Aspen’s pseudo-cowboys drop thousands of dollars on Kemo Sabe, Western apparel is embroiled in a contentious authenticity scare. Those are fashion boots, not workboots, profess the real cowboys among us. Your Carhartt isn’t even broken in, and if it is, it’s because you bought it vintage. Me me me me more cowboy than you.

Fake cowboy finger-pointing persists as an accusation of stolen valor. Movie and real cowboys alike represent a loose collection of “American ideals”: working-class discipline, upstanding character, and patriotism. Instagram’s trad wives — another bit of thinkpiece fodder that keeps on giving — suggest that traditional, heteronormative family structures are among the cowboy dress-up rules of engagement.

But, as Young Republicans decorate their parties with images of Trump and Vance in cowboy hats, cowboy imagery has strong staying power on the other side of the aisle. From Chappell Roan’s hot pink tassels, to rhinestoned Westernwear at Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour, to the popularity of queer line dancing night at Studcountry in Echo Park, we cannot, it seems, stop dreaming of cowboys.

I, born and raised in downtown Chicago, Illinois, am surely no authority on what constitutes a real cowboy. I am perfectly situated, though, to discuss the self-sustaining niche of fake cowboy-ness, and why the Aritzia-clad young women of the coasts still feel called to wear their bedazzled cowboy hats to the club or pick up D.S. & Durga’s Cowgirl Grass on a romp around Williamsburg.

Parallel to the prominence of Westernwear on the runway and Bella Hadid being papped on her way to the rodeo is a small but notable handful of cowboy-themed perfumes released in the past few years. Fragrance operates free from the confines of authenticity-signalling with which Western apparel is concerned. Perfumery is, fundamentally, a gesture of evocation, of seeming, rather than being. As HALOSCOPE’s own Audrey Robinovitz writes in her defense of aldehydes, there is an “ innate and deeply beautiful artifice of all perfumery.” As such, the Western perfume trend is not marked by an authenticity competition like that ensuing in fashion.

Ask any ranch worker what the labor of a cowboy actually smells like, and you will probably get the same answer I did — ranch work smells, overwhelmingly, of manure. Of cowboy fragrances released in the past couple of years, none reach for an Agar Olfactory or Toskovat-esque verisimilitude in recreating this unsavory part of the West. This is not to say that there are no gestures towards authenticity in the world of Western perfumes — there are a handful of Western houses that market on the basis of their “realness.” TruWestern, as its name suggests, markets their line of fragrances inspired by real locations in the American West. 

The other type of authenticity one could reach for in the quest to smell like a cowboy is colognes enjoyed by the real cowboys in question. The real cowboys I’ve been lucky enough to speak to display a preference for the classics of masculine perfumery — a Ralph Lauren Red Label or Tom Ford Ombré Leather snagged under the guidance of department store employees. Why return home from the range just to cover yourself in its scent again? Clean up nice with some Acqua di Gio.

A survey of cowboy perfumes is incomplete, however, without the founding father, the John Wayne of olfactory Western-ness, Stetson’s Coty, referred to in common parlance simply as Stetson. Stetson’s fragrance met the same fate as its hats — it became a floating signifier of rugged masculinity, entirely unmoored from its roots on the range. My grandfather, a high school teacher in the Great Ohio Desert, wore Stetson. Stetson represents the ability of fragrance to transcend the Westernwear authenticity rat-race: wearing a cowboy hat in Cleveland might turn heads and raise questions, but Stetson acts as a sort of invisible masculine armor, one any man may don to feel, you know, free, and American. Stetson later released Lady Stetson for all the cowgirls seeking similar projections. Where Stetson Coty’s marketing dodges explicitly colonial implications, making vague gestures to a masculine valiance that happens to take place in the West, Lady Stetson is “how the West was won.”

In contrast, cowboy-themed perfumes released in the 2020s exist largely as a wink and a nod to their fakeness, their inauthenticity, their uncalloused hands. Despite the ubiquity of Stetson and the success of brands like TruWestern, high-end cowboy fragrances hailing from the world of everything expensive, superfluous, artsy, and soft, seem acutely aware of the paradox of their own existence. 

Suede Pony (2021) & Cowboy Kush (2022) — Boy Smells

Los Angeles-based perfumery Boy Smells knows its place: Los Angeles is the only place where one must go eastward to get to The West. Tucked in the corner of Southern California, Los Angeles is not always regarded as part of The West, that mythic place of wide open skies and agricultural work ethic. It is an urban landscape of office jobs and plastic surgery and athleisure. The house has released two cowboy-themed scents, Cowboy Kush, and the recently discontinued Suede Pony. Neither attempt to gesture at some lived Western experience, but rather, from their vantage point in Hollywood, tell stories of what registered Democrats who shop at Glossier would like the image of the cowboy to mean.

Suede Pony opens with a strong suede/leather accord but dries down to a core of woodsy cardamom and sparkling fresh fruit. Suede Pony smells like a tentative first mojito in the lobby of Aspen’s Hotel Jerome, surrounded by clean leather and bouquets of dried flowers, where perhaps a man in Kemo Sabe will tell you tales of crypto mining in Austin or commercial real estate in San Francisco. Stories free of manure, and grass, but stories of Western profiteering nonetheless. 

Cowboy Kush walks a similar path, if not a slightly dirtier one, though the nutty woodiness of the drydown borders on sweet. I have yet to smell a photorealistic cannabis accord in any fragrance, and this is no exception, but along with the patchouli and leather, Cowboy Kush is an altogether bolder and smokier evocation of cowboy imagery than Suede Pony. Cowboy Kush could be an olfactory profile of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, a marijuana-fueled Los Angeles murder mystery that bears the mark of old Hollywood cowboys in its particular flavor of masculinity. It is hedonistic hippie ritual in a Western-ish leather jacket.

Untamable (2024) — Imaginary Authors

Earlier I said no new perfume releases have reached for verisimilitudinous notes of animal and grass. This is not entirely true — Imaginary Authors’ “Untamable” cuts it pretty close. As a white floral enjoyer myself, my nose is perhaps not sufficiently well-versed in the world of animalics to judge the caliber of this perfume. I just know that it comes on strong. The drydown, however, is a brighter and more mellow woody and grassy cumin. Operating out of Portland, Oregon, Imaginary Authors is also located on the fringe of The West proper but serves up a take on the imagined West that is refreshing and unique in its brutalism.

Corpus Equus (2021) — Naomi Goodsir

Rest in peace to every horse who met an untimely demise on a John Ford film. There are horses all over the marketing of Corpus Equus, but it stops short of including the earthy animalic notes of Untamable — Corpus Equus is a pleasant smoky leather. There is a trend among the fragrances on this list of opening with a strong Western scent profile and drying down to a core of florals and amber. It is a gesture of trying on cowboy hats at the Venice Nick Fouquet but ultimately leaving them on the shelf — you’re not really a cowgirl, are you? Corpus Equus opens with a sharp, masculine edge of leather and smoke, drying down to an inoffensive if dusky rose. Its leather, while it lasts, toes a line between bitter and warm. This is not the body of a horse, but the smell of its surrounding stable, of what one imagines to be true about the type of person who rides a horse. See: American, free.

Cowgirl Grass (2024) — D.S. and Durga

We now arrive at the secret of this piece, which is that it is, at its core, a eulogy. In 2024, Brooklyn-based perfumery D.S. & Durga released a reformulation of their discontinued 2004 scent Cowgirl Grass. In a similar gesture to the launch of Lady Stetson, the original scent was the life partner of the brand’s other Western-inspired scent, Cowboy Grass, which is a straightforwardly grassy blend of vetiver and thyme so bright it is almost metallic. I imagine the original Cowgirl Grass, a similar blend with added tuberose and rose, smelled similarly. I don’t know her, and I never will.

Cowgirl Grass is situated firmly in the Suede Pony tradition of proud inauthenticity. It opens with an inoffensively sweet lychee that is not quite edible, fading into a powdered sugar ambery musk reminiscent of DeD Cool’s Xtra Milk. The vetiver accord is not noticeable so much as it serves to clean the whole thing up to a department store septicness. 

If that sounds patronizing, it is not because I necessarily dislike Cowgirl Grass 2024, but out of initial confusion as to why this scent is roped (ha, ha) into the Western conversation via its name and marketing. D.S. & Durga describes the dry-down as “tough musk from the wild Western territory,” a quirky take on what is otherwise the star note of many cozy clean-girl perfumes of late. It avoids the colonial implications of Stetson’s copywriting. The florals of cowgirl grass are more reminiscent of the bubbly peony of OUAI’s Melrose Place than the dusky rose one would expect from the ranch diva conjured by D.S.’ imagery of “classic cowgirl belts encrusted in jewels.” OUAI’s Melrose Place, with a nearly identical notes list, locates itself squarely in West Hollywood, rather than out on the range. “Smell,” reads OUAI’s description of their own musky lychee pink floral, “like you only eat avocado toast.”

Again we encounter Los Angeles’ Western-ness paradox. Despite being situated near the country’s Westernmost point, the avocado-toast-eating Los Angeles pilates princess is almost directly antithetical to the iconography of the Wild West — working-class Americana, old-school glamour. I can’t help but feel that OUAI’s marketing of Melrose Place is more true to the olfactory profile these scents share.

In that case, why choose this name, this angle? A pessimistic answer would be that of a cash grab, a swipe for what money remains left on the table of the Western trend. Perhaps D.S. & Durga’s recent venture capital acquisition exposed a gap in middle-American markets.

What I feel — what I optimistically hope — is that the reformulation is a more honest Brooklyn cowgirl perfume than its predecessor. It is perhaps more honest for a Brooklyn-based perfumery to market this way, to let the cowboy enthusiasts of the coasts get their fix in a more subtle gesture than a rhinestoned cowboy hat. Cowgirl Grass dispenses with the pretense of a strong leather or smoke opening and skips straight to the point that most cowboy perfumes arrive at as they sit on your wrist — it’s a feminine floral with a Western name. It is a poster of Marlon Brando on a teenage girl’s bedroom wall. It is true to what we dream of when we dream of the cowboy. It is perhaps more honest to enter a dive bar on the arm of a Carhartt-clad Bushwick cowboy smelling of lychee and amber than smelling, for some reason, of shit. 🌀

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Caelan Reeves is a writer from Chicago. You can find her fragrance writing and other dispatches from the simulacra on Instagram and Twitter.