Forget Axe body spray and Old Spice – spurred by a plethora of prolific male fragrance influencers, today’s young men are buying $300 colognes
“It’s Wednesday. Let’s unbox this $300 Creed cologne and go to the gym,” says the 22-year-old influencer known as Fragrance Knowledge in a recent TikTok unboxing the new Aventus Cologne. Behind him are a plethora of fragrance bottles easily recognisable to any ‘fraghead’, as perfume fans are often monikered online: flankers of Jean Paul Gaultier’s famed Le Male, Paco Rabanne’s 1 Million, and, of course, the original Creed Aventus. In the same clip, Evan, the man behind Fragrance Knowledge, also unboxes Creed’s Silver Mountain Water, which he describes as “the Creed that probably women like the most, at least in my experience”.
Evan was inspired to create his fragrance channel in 2020 after seeking out an online review of a bottle of Stetson cologne. Four years and hundreds of videos later, Evan, who lives in Arkansas and prefers to go by his first name only for privacy purposes, is now one of the leading male influencers in the online fragrance sphere, with close to one million followers on TikTok. 90 per cent of those viewers are men, he says, with 63 per cent of them between 18 and 24. “I started this page because I wanted to grow my confidence,” Evan says, “and now I’m just trying to help other people grow their confidence.”
Evan’s reach is sizable, but he is far from the only influencer tapping into a growing audience of young, male fragrance fans. Ash Kirkland of Gents Scents commands over 460,000 subscribers on YouTube, where he posts daily videos like “10 Fragrances That Leave Unforgettable Impressions On Every Woman You Meet”. Darian Hill, who styles himself the Bow Tie Fragrance Guy, talks to his 163,000 YouTube subscribers about categories like “panty-dropping fragrances”. Dallas Dundra, of Chaos Fragrances, extols the value of “beast mode” perfumes to his 220,000-plus audience.
“They’re really brutally honest,” says Elaina Herpel, head of partnerships at niche fragrance retailer Twisted Lily. “And I think a lot of men – and as we’ve been seeing them become younger and younger – really appreciate the guidance they can get from them.”
The last decade has seen many fragrance brands forgo the ‘sex sells’ advertising that dominated the early 00s, and instead adopt unisex branding and values like ingredient transparency and “clean” formulations. But the online popularity of videos centred around “best date night perfumes” and “panty-dropping fragrances” implies that, while individual expression and ingredient transparency are all well and good, many consumers still have a fairly old-school motivation in choosing a fragrance: garnering compliments, specifically from the opposite sex.
“The videos you see going viral repeatedly are like, ‘Oh my god, this fragrance got me chased down the street. This got me folded like a lawn chair,’” says influencer Emelia O’Toole, also known as Professor Perfume. While O’Toole doesn’t believe fragrance needs to be divided by gender, she says she is often asked to provide scent recommendations for men. “As women, when we get ready for a date, we have all these things at our disposal that make us feel at our best,” says Herpel. “Whereas for men, I think they really lean on the fragrance piece to feel their most confident and be who they want to be that night.”
@fragranceknowledge You pull no women if you wear these #fragranceknowledge #cologne #fragrancesformen ♬ Blade Runner 2049 - Synthwave Goose
While men may traditionally have had fewer tools than women to boost their looks, they are not exempt from social pressures to measure up. Increasingly, unrealistic body standards – physiques once reserved for the likes of professional bodybuilders and fictional superheroes – are becoming the new normal, leading many young men to turn to social media for tips on “looksmaxxing” and other incel-adjacent practices like mewing.
There is a tipping point, however, between helping young men feel more confident and promoting pick-up artist-adjacent values. Evan of Fragrance Knowledge, for his part, tries to keep his channel family-friendly, staying away from curse words and terms like “panty-droppers”, believing it sends the wrong message to his young male audience. But the origins of the male fragrance influencer can be traced back to perhaps a single figure, whose appeal largely hinges on his hyper-masculine persona: Jeremy Fragrance.
With 8.9 million followers on TikTok and 2.3 million on YouTube, Jeremy Fragrance’s presence looms large over the male fragrance influencer genre. His besuited, chiselled visage and plethora of reviews on scents like Bleu de Chanel and Dior Sauvage won him the Fragrance Foundation’s inaugural Fragrance Influencer of the Year Award back in 2018, while his eccentric antics – like jumping on tables and performing knuckle push-ups – have earned him a reach beyond fragrance fans. “I feel like that was aspirational to a lot of young men who were watching,” says O’Toole of Jeremy’s influence. “I’ve seen a couple of teenagers pop up wearing blazers, doing like fragrance on the street videos, and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, what has Jeremy done.’”
TikTokers like That Fragrance Kid have seemingly taken up the mantle for a new generation, one with increasingly refined taste. A Jeremy Fragrance Instagram reel from earlier this year shows the influencer talking to a young boy who claims to be wearing Mancera Lemon Line, a $180 citrus perfume that’s a far cry from the Axe body spray of yore. O’Toole, who is based in South Dakota, recalls a recent visit to New York City’s Scent Bar where she observed two teenage boys asking about high-end brands like Tom Ford and Xerjoff. “They smelled like 100 different fragrances just while I was standing there and then they left without buying anything,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘That is so teenage boy.’”
Herpel, whose company is owned by the US distributor for niche perfume labels like Xerjoff and Mancera, notes there has been an uptick in boys as young as 17 asking to smell those brands at department stores. And that’s despite the fact that a bottle of, say, Xerjoff Alexandria II — one of Evan’s favourite scents — starts at $325. “I think younger people are more and more willing to invest in the items that they really feel are going to make a difference in their confidence,” she says. “When [my brother] was 20 he was really into sneakers, and he didn’t have much to spend, but he would spend $300 on sneakers. I think that that can translate to fragrance too.”
Wearing a good cologne can certainly be an avenue to feeling more confident, Evan acknowledges. But for all his love of fragrance, even he advises his followers not to believe the hype they see online. “Most of my comments are, ‘Which cologne do you think will get me compliments from women?’ And I always reply, ‘A good smile.’”