Teenage girls aren’t the only young people raiding store aisles once thought of as strictly adult-only: While pre-teen and teenage girls are stocking up on pricey skin-care products at Sephora, teenage boys are hitting the perfume aisle.
“Cologne has become such a big thing for me that I don’t feel embarrassed about my interest in it,” enthuses 15-year-old Clive in the latest conversation for SheKnows’ “Be a Man” series. “I love cologne.”
Indeed, there’s no denying that cologne culture among pre-teen boys is widespread: Perfume is the fastest-growing beauty category among teenagers, with teenage boys leading the growth, according to Piper Sandler’s biannual study of youth spending patterns. The New York TimesA quick survey here at the SheKnows office reveals that many boys between the ages of 12 and 17 are just as comfortable buying perfume as they are buying sports equipment or, frankly, anything else.
My 15-year-old son, Kobe, has a part-time job at a local pizza place and often spends his entire paycheck on high-end perfumes, which he neatly arranges in clear plastic boxes for easy viewing (ironically, it’s the only neatly organized spot on his desk). He also subscribes to Scentbird, a cologne subscription service that delivers monthly cologne samples in 8mL vials. (And any he doesn’t like, he generously gives to his 12-year-old brother, a promising scent lover who wears perfume to elite events like flag football practice.)
A box of cologne belonging to the author’s 15-year-old son.
Rita Templeton
In a SheKnows survey of boys ages 13-19, almost half of teens (just over 46%) said they wear cologne every day, with only 7% saying they rarely or never wear cologne. The average age at which they started wearing cologne was 13 and a half, and 75% of respondents said they preferred “woody and earthy” scents (only 8% preferred “floral”). Gucci Guilty and Yves Saint Laurent were popular (Paco Rabanne colognes were also often heard of), but most boys prefer to buy their cologne online or from department or specialty stores rather than drugstores, confirming their penchant for luxury brands. Around 64% said they rely on recommendations from marketers (advertisers, spokespeople, etc.) to buy a new fragrance, with friends coming in a close second at just over 54%. Surprisingly, cologne influencers came in third, tied with parents/guardians at 45%. do Listen to your parents sometimes.
So what’s driving this trend of pre-teen boys collecting luxury cologne? First and foremost, social media is to blame.
“This is a new trend driven by TikTok,” Emily Mascarell, fragrance and beauty product development consultant at Emily Consulting, tells SheKnows. “Teenage boys are becoming more savvy and have a strong interest in designer brands, so they tend to collect designer brands and wear them all day at school. These fragrances become status symbols and satisfy a sense of belonging among their peers.”
It’s a status symbol indeed. “Generation Z are self-described emotional consumers who make their first luxury purchase at around age 15 — five years before millennials,” Cassi Bruno, co-founder of Los Angeles-based strategy consultancy Culture Bureau, tells SheKnows. “They’re driving the growth of the luxury market and are the most uncompromising when it comes to buying what they believe to be the best. They’re a generation that has always prided themselves on being connoisseurs, and cologne is one category where they’re showing off that knowledge and sophistication.”
Bruno says this is not too far from the days of Axe Body Spray and Davidoff Cool Water, but “now there’s more brand awareness, especially around luxury brands,” she says. “In the past, young men were limited to drugstores or department stores and didn’t have many places to discover new scents. They could only talk to their friends, scratch and sniff ads in magazines, or walk around the store and spray. Today, TikTok is really fueling conversations around personal care, grooming and luxury. This digital mania tends to translate into real-world shopping behavior across a range of topics of interest.”
Indeed, the cologne craze has been fueled in part by social media influencers offering tips like “smellmax” and “enhance the musk,” but none of the teenage boys SheKnows spoke to were fans of the term. (“People just don’t use that word,” noted Joan, a 14-year-old who wears Rabanne Phantom cologne, which comes in a silver, robot-shaped package.)
Leading cologne influencers include Jeremy Fragrance, who has over 9 million followers on TikTok; TheCologneBoy, a 17-year-old boy with around 1.7 million followers who talks about cologne in the context of making him feel “sexy”; Christopher Lee Fragrances, a YouTuber with 411,000 followers who does cologne reviews and “before-you-buy” comparisons (yes, kids are getting recommendations from YouTube, too); and ThatFragranceKid, a 15-year-old boy with 409,000 followers who says he got into cologne because of Jeremy Fragrance. These influencers often use descriptive words to identify fragrances and recommend scents for different occasions. However, most of the boys SheKnows spoke to didn’t offer complex explanations when asked to describe the scents they wear. “It’s hard to describe, but it just smells so good,” says 17-year-old Jackson about his current favorite cologne, Paco Rabanne’s One Million Lucky.
They may not always be descriptive, but boys certainly know what they like, and many of them change it up with the seasons. 14-year-old Theo tells us that “fruity and fresh scents are great for summer” (his warm-weather choice is Giorgio Armani’s Acqua Di Gio), while Maison Margiela’s Replica by the Fireplace is not quite what he describes as “warm,” “smoky,” “spicy,” and “sophisticated.” He summed up the importance of seasonal scents this way: “Imagine walking by a guy who’s really sweaty. You’re sweaty and hot. And then you smell like a fireplace. It smells great, but it’s not summer.”
From a psychological standpoint, the cologne craze isn’t surprising. Teenagers generally behave in ways that make them feel more grown-up. In an interview with NPR, Kim Alexander, PhD, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, said that wearing cologne makes teenagers feel more grown-up: “We can all remember a moment in our youth when we really wanted to be grown-up, or had a desire for agency and independence.”
Surprisingly, the brands at the center of the fragrance trend aren’t marketing their wares to teenagers—in fact, they’re keeping relatively quiet. The New York Timespoints out that none of the fragrance brands she contacted responded to her queries, and she speculates that there may be “a little anxiety about engaging with a very young customer.” Mascarelle agrees, acknowledging that “brands are very interested in this trend, but they also recognise that trends can change quickly with social media and that Gen Z tends to be less brand loyal. So brands have to strike a delicate balance between maintaining appeal without targeting too narrowly and risking losing exclusivity.”
Whether or not it appeals directly to teenagers, the trend shows no signs of slowing down. One mother of a 12-year-old reports that when her son was packing for summer camp this year, half his friends were talking about what cologne they were bringing. Are you excited about the scent of summer?
