Some people spend a lifetime trying to find where they belong. Chloé Ellert has built a career from questioning whether belonging has to mean fitting neatly into a single place, identity, or idea at all. A sexologist, certified clinical aromatherapist, and founder of Her by Chloe, she approaches women’s sexuality through an unusually holistic lens, weaving together science, nervous system regulation, aromatherapy, and erotic literature to explore how pleasure, healing, and desire are deeply connected. Rather than offering quick fixes or rigid formulas, her work encourages women to reconnect with the wisdom of their own bodies.

That perspective is inseparable from a life shaped by movement and reinvention. Raised between the United States, Hong Kong, and France, Chloé describes herself as a Third Culture Kid with no singular cultural identity, a reality that taught her to question the assumptions society often presents as universal truths. Her own experience of sexual trauma further transformed curiosity into purpose. Studying sexology gave her the language to understand what she had lived through, but it also revealed the gap between diagnosis and healing. Determined to bridge that divide, she developed the Smut-Scent Method, an approach born from both academic research and deeply personal experience.

Underlying everything is a simple but quietly radical belief: women deserve more than inherited narratives about their bodies, relationships, and sexuality. By helping women experience safety, autonomy, and pleasure as embodied realities rather than abstract ideals, she challenges cultural scripts that have long reduced desire to something shameful or conditional.

In this conversation, Chloé reflects on identity, trauma, self-love, intimacy, emotional freedom, and the politics of women’s bodies with refreshing honesty and nuance. The result is a thoughtful exploration of what it truly means to reclaim pleasure not as a luxury or reward, but as an essential part of reclaiming oneself.

Having lived what you call

“Four lives”  as having lived “four lives” and being a third culture kid with no single cultural identity. How has growing up between different cultures shaped the way you think about women’s sexuality, desire, and the societal expectations placed upon it?

Chloé: I think growing up between cultures normalised something in my mind that, unfortunately, still isn’t normal everywhere: women are and should be equals. It’s such an obvious concept to me that I never questioned whether I was more or less capable than a man simply because I was a woman.

Being a Third Culture Kid also taught me that there isn’t one “correct” way to be a woman. Every culture has its own expectations around women, sexuality, femininity, marriage, motherhood, and desire. Once you’ve lived in multiple worlds, you realise that many of those expectations aren’t universal truths: they’re cultural stories. And if they’re stories, they can be rewritten.

Again, I didn’t grow up thinking I was limited by my gender. It was only when I moved out of Hong Kong and back to the U.S. that I noticed the stark difference, especially after graduating college in 2018.

I see Hong Kong as being more culturally conservative than France because of its British colonial history and the strong influence of traditional Chinese values. And yet, strangely enough, I never felt safer being a girl than I did growing up there. I’ve honestly never felt that same level of safety since I left. That has always stayed with me because it challenged what I assumed “conservative” automatically meant.

France, on the other hand, has always embraced sensuality in a way I deeply appreciate. Women are allowed to be beautiful, sexual beings without that automatically becoming controversial. Sex isn’t treated as something shameful or hidden away: it’s simply understood as part of being human.

I don’t want to make the U.S. sound like a regressive country because I genuinely loved living here, especially the America I experienced growing up and through college. But we’ve all seen what’s happened to women’s rights in recent years. For the first time in my life, I found myself living in a country where my body, my choices, and my sexuality felt like they were open to public debate. I know that doesn’t represent every American, but it was a difficult realisation nonetheless.

When I compare the three cultures that shaped me, I don’t think one is perfect, and the others are flawed. They’ve all given me something. But growing up between them taught me to question every assumption I was handed about what women “should” be.

Maybe that’s why I don’t believe women need another box to fit into. I think we’ve had enough of those already.

It’s 2026, not 1956.

Being Abstract and Starts Being Felt 

The Smut-Scent Method sits at the intersection of aromatherapy, sexuality, and nervous system work. What does “healing through sensation” look like when stripped of theory and brought into lived, human experience?

Chloé: The body can accomplish amazing things when we stop letting our thinking brain run the entire show. That same thinking brain was fed assumptions, roles, trauma, identities, and years of conditioning. The thinking brain is the conditioned adult that lives by rules, and the body is the child that experiences everything before the mind has a chance to judge it.

Our lived experiences are also recorded in the body: in how our anxiety is triggered, how quickly we move between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, how open we are to sex, and how our body responds to sexual stimuli.

The body doesn’t lie. But the thinking brain will often convince us that danger is still present because it’s trying to protect us. The problem is that sometimes it keeps trying to protect us long after the danger has passed.

That’s why healing through sensation is so important to me. I want the body to experience safety for itself. I want it to collect new experiences. I want it to remember what curiosity, softness, desire, and pleasure feel like again.

That’s why I combine sexology, aromatherapy, and smut. To me, they aren’t separate disciplines: they’re three parts that create a whole. They each speak to the body and the nervous system differently, allowing healing to stop being something we only understand intellectually and become something we can actually feel.

Learning Pleasure Again, Gently 

Trauma-informed work often focuses on protection and boundaries but less on the rediscovery of pleasure. How is pleasure safely reintroduced without overwhelming the nervous system? 

Chloé: I want to start this one off by saying that every woman is different. There is not one woman with the same needs, triggers, resilience, or relationship to her sexuality. That being said, trauma-informed work is extremely important in order to be able to feel pleasure at all. It’s the murky part of what I do, but I also see the activation of pleasure as a way of gently softening a lot of the physical and mental resistance that trauma creates.

The two feed off each other.

I’ll always want to make pleasure the focal point because it gives the body new experiences and, most importantly, kicks cortisol to the curb a little while welcoming dopamine and oxytocin back in.

This is why I use smut alongside essential oils in my trauma-informed work. It not only is safe, but it feels safe. Reading smut happens privately, at your own pace, without pressure or expectation, while aromatherapy allows the body to associate those moments with comfort, safety, and pleasure. We want that parasympathetic nervous system to wake up a little.

It allows her to create a new set of beliefs that her body will believe because it can actually feel them: sex can be safe, sex can feel good, and pleasure is still hers.

I see this especially in women who are survivors of rape or sexual assault. Women have to remember that they are more than their trauma. They are still women with sexual needs, with desire, and with every right to pleasure.

Rule No One Questions Enough 

Society often tells women to “love themselves” before entering a relationship. Do you agree with that advice, or do relationships themselves sometimes become part of the healing process? 

Chloé: Oh… OH… Yes… 10000 times yes. Because how can you expect someone else to love you if you can’t match that with yourself? I know some absolutely hate hearing this, and my heart goes out to them, because I was one of those women who wanted the shortcut because I thought it would give me value. I also thought this in a body that was completely trauma-ridden and living in a state of self-loathing, which is a very common state to live in when you’re battling trauma, known or unknown. Relationships can be PART of the healing process, but that doesn’t mean we should expect the other person to be our lover, our therapist, our best friend, and our punching bag. Does that sound fair? Self-love is energy, and you’ll get back what you put out.

Relationships absolutely can be part of the healing process. They provide the fairy dust we sometimes need, but they’re not meant to replace the work we have to do ourselves. We still have to be our own hero. I know some of the romantics out there may disagree, but I think that being in your 30s opens your eyes a little too wide. Love should conquer all, absolutely. Like our lovely unicorn, Harry Styles, once said (I’m paraphrasing): “Fill your own cup and let them fall in love with the overflow. And if there’s one man who knows anything about love, it’s Harry.

The Illusion of Sexual Freedom

Casual sex is often celebrated as empowerment, while others argue it leaves people feeling increasingly detached. Where do you stand, and do you think we’ve confused sexual freedom with emotional freedom? 

Chloé: Oh WOW. I’m going to ruffle some feathers with this one. As a disclaimer, this is my opinion; this is what my nervous system needs and what it won’t tolerate.

I’m a “no” vote on casual sex.

Because there is nothing casual about sex to me. Sex is one of the most vulnerable experiences we can have. It’s about receiving, emotionally and physically. What we do with our bodies becomes part of what our bodies remember, and I think that inevitably shapes how we experience intimacy, connection, and even our own worth.

Could casual sex feel empowering for some women? Absolutely. But for me, it removes the emotional foundation that makes sex meaningful in the first place.

And no, I’m not religious. I’m just a cautious, slightly cynical millennial romantic who was deeply traumatised in her past.

When sex becomes casual, it starts feeling transactional, conditional, and mechanical to me.

I absolutely believe we can be sexually free and emotionally free at the same time. But I don’t think sexual freedom has to mean casual sex. Sexual freedom can look like exploring your sexuality with yourself. It can look like deeply fulfilling intimacy with someone you genuinely love. It can look like saying yes. It can also look like saying no.

To me, real sexual freedom is being able to choose what genuinely feels safe for your body rather than what culture tells you should feel empowering.

I don’t know that casual sex, for me personally, translates into safety. And if my nervous system doesn’t feel safe, my body isn’t truly free either.

Of course, context matters. Every relationship has its own social contract, and every woman gets to decide what feels right for her. But I think we’ve become so focused on asking whether women are sexually liberated that we’ve forgotten to ask whether they actually feel emotionally free.

To me, those are two very different questions.

If every woman could leave 

This conversation carries one new belief about her body, her pleasure, and her right to experience both fully. What would that message be, and why does it matter now more than ever?

Chloé: I think if I wanted every woman to leave this conversation believing one thing, it would be this: Your pleasure isn’t something you have to earn. It’s your birthright.

This is something I find so hard to put into words because I can feel it so vividly in my body.

Why don’t we, by default, have those human rights?

It makes me incredibly sad that this is even a topic of debate in 2026 because pleasure is a human right. Sexuality is a human right. Orgasms are a human right.

Women shouldn’t have to justify wanting pleasure, wanting desire, wanting autonomy over their own bodies, or wanting to feel safe inside them.

And yet, our rights as women are still being debated and stripped back in some places, and our bodies are still so often reduced to sexual objects instead of being recognised as our own.

We only have to glance at the growing popularity of the manosphere to see that, ironically and infuriatingly, many women feel like they’re fighting battles they thought had already been won.

That’s why this work matters to me. Because helping a woman reconnect with her body isn’t just about better sex: it’s about reminding her that her body belongs to her first.

Everything else comes after that.

Editor Note

We inherit more than our eye colour or family traditions. We also inherit ideas about our bodies, our relationships, our desires, and the quiet rules that tell us what is acceptable to want. Many of those beliefs arrive so early that they begin to feel like instinct rather than instruction, shaping our choices long before we realise they were never entirely our own.

Perhaps the most difficult question is not whether those stories are true, but whether they still belong to us. Safety, pleasure, intimacy, and identity are often spoken about as separate conversations, yet in lived experience they are deeply intertwined. The body remembers what the mind has learned to dismiss, and certainty can become less useful than curiosity when we begin paying attention to what we actually feel instead of what we have been taught to believe.

If your body could speak without fear of judgement, what truths would it ask you to hear?