The MAGA extended fragrance universe
Transphobic perfume for her, sigma male cologne for him.
Last week, I had never heard of Brittany Aldean. This week, I find her in my inbox not once, but twice. Aldean, née Kerr, is a former American Idol contestant turned momfluencer, perhaps best known for being the wife of country music singer Jason Aldean. She is in my inbox because she is now also a fragrance brand founder.
On Thursday, Aldean launched Vada, a line of three fragrances designed for “the woman who is rooted in red, white and blue and has good values. Maybe she’s raising a family or building a career but is faith-based,” as Aldean told the conservative women’s magazine Evie. She first showed up in my inbox on Wednesday when Puck broke the news of the brand launch. On Thursday, I received an email on behalf of Katie Caplener’s jewelry and accessories brand also named Vada, which was launched in 2013. It is, as Caplener’s PR would like to make clear, “run by somebody with completely different political affiliations” than Aldean’s Vada.
There is good reason to feel touchy about the possibility someone might confuse your brand with Aldean’s. Aldean’s Evie feature on the Vada launch makes a sudden detour from talking about perfume to mention the “heat” Aldean received when, in a 2022 Instagram caption, she thanked her parents “for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase. I love this girly life.” The comment and a subsequent Instagram Stories post doubling down on the statement led to her husband being dropped by his PR firm. Brittany Martinez, author of the Evie feature, notes that the unhinged “outrage to such a normal, healthy sentiment” directly led Aldean to start her Vada brand. She does not mention any heat Aldean or her husband received for the fact that their relationship started while Jason was still married to his first wife, or that such behavior might run contrary to their family and faith-based values, but no matter.
While it’s jarring to have a such a transphobic interlude in the middle of an article about a perfume launch, I imagine anyone picking up Aldean’s fragrance knows exactly what kind of values they’re buying into. It’s not like Aldean, who recently collected the Moms for America “Mothers of Influence Award” at Mar-a-Lago, is the only one selling jasmine-bergamot-fig-sandalwood perfumes for under $100. And since you can already showcase your political allegiance through an augmented Mar-a-Lago face or Republican makeup, why shouldn’t you have a MAGA fragrance in your beauty routine too?
Aldean’s particular brand of MAGA femininity aside, fragrance has long since been a vehicle for exploring ideas about gender. That includes Revlon’s 1973 launch Charlie, a scent for the ‘70s career woman archetype who wore pants, or the unisex CK One that embraced ‘90s androgyny. Today, Vada joins a certain corner of perfumes and fragrance culture that have come to exemplify the codes of masculinity and femininity that often run adjacent to red-pill and manosphere idealogy.
That ideology is perhaps most visible in the men’s fragrance sphere1. Take the recent boon in Dior Sauvage, already one of the best selling fragrances in the world. In 2020, the Guardian reported that Johnny Depp fans were likely boosting sales of Dior Sauvage, of which Depp is a longtime face, to show support for the actor after a U.K. court determined there was evidence to suggest he had beat his wife, Amber Heard. Fans did the same during his 2022 defamation trial against Heard.
For a time, as male fragrance influencers entered the mainstream post-2020, my social feeds saw a trickle of young men talking about “sigma male” scents. “Sigmas” occupy the confident, independent, “lone wolf” archetype in the toxic masculinity hierarchy, as personified by the likes of Patrick Bateman. Alpha males, the “leaders” in the hierarchy, are also the subject of their own fragrance round-ups. Most of these roundups reference male designer classics like Azzaro or Dior, or the hypermasculine — or homoerotic, depending how you look at it —Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male.
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These videos, and the wider-sphere of male fragrance influencers, are not always explicitly MAGA. Some are riffs of or at least in conversation with the ur-male fragrance influencer, Jeremy Fragrance, whose own values and performance of masculinity exist on an indecipherable spectrum between parody and sincerity. But the language those influencers espouse, like fragrancemaxxing, is impossible to untangle from the larger category of looksmaxxing and its roots in the manosphere, where the pursuit of hyper-masculine aesthetics takes on an almost cartoonish horseshoe bend right back to femininity.
Many male fragrance videos are more earnest attempts to answer the question that happens to also act as a common to entry-point to red-pill or pick-up artist values: how do I get women to like me? That doesn’t mean all proponents have fully gone down the rabbit hole. When I interviewed the fragrance influencer Evan, a.k.a. Fragrance Knowledge, on the topic for Dazed back in 2024, he gave a rather wholesome answer to such a question. “Most of my comments are, ‘Which cologne do you think will get me compliments from women?’ And I always reply, ‘A good smile.’”
That is not to say there isn’t an explicit MAGA fragrance: for that, there’s Donald Trump’s Victory perfume, launched in 2024 ahead of his eventual reelection. Unsurprisingly for a website that lists an anti-vax dog whistle in its banner, Fragrantica has been consistently on the Trump fragrance beat, which now also includes Fight Fight Fight, with “for him” and “for her” versions.
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It’s worth noting that Ivanka Trump also had a fragrance at one time, launched in 2012 when she still had a clothing line. She has since abandoned licensing her name to mall products and seems to now be spending her time on the wellness-grifter-podcasting circuit. Will Barron pick up the fragrance torch? Or is he too busy making canned yerba mate?
Brittany Aldean is something of a pioneer in making a female-targeted scent explicitly for the MAGA crowd, but she’s not the first female influencer-turned-perfumer to allegedly, maybe, perhaps, support Trump. In 2024, TikToker Scout Dixon West’s namesake perfume brand was dropped by retailers like Arielle Shoshana and Luckyscent after derogatory social media posts of hers resurfaced and followers speculated on her support of Trump. In a since-deleted TikTok, she asked fans not to make “assumptions” about her political views. Her aesthetic is more Silver Lake than Aldean’s Tennessee country wife get up, but these days a stick-and-poke tattoo aesthetic isn’t disqualifying for going MAGA.
Dixon West’s perfume content has been quiet in recent months, although not absent. In December, she did a sponsored post for Dior Homme Intense, which recently arrived to the U.S. market. And, according to Dixon West, it smells great on both men and women.
There’s an interesting push and pull I see anytime straight men embrace a female-dominated category. When I worked at Hypebeast, it seemed to me that streetwear’s status as the one corner of fashion where straight men were the default encouraged a doubling down on macho values, as evidenced by the raging misogyny in our comments section, or the terror in the higher-ups’ eyes if we ever pitched something that could be interpreted as girly or, god forbid, gay.
Wow, I didn’t think Dior Sauvage could smell any more sinister. I learned so many cursed facts, thank you for the hard hitting fragrance journalism.