“It’s Wednesday. Let’s unbox this $300 Creed cologne and go to the gym,” says the 22-year-old influencer often 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 sometimes monikered online: flankers of Jean Paul Gaultier’s famed Le Male, Paco Rabanne’s 1 Million, and, after all, the unique Creed Aventus. In the identical clip, Evan, the person behind Fragrance Knowledge, also unboxes Creed’s Silver Mountain Water, which he describes as “the Creed that probably women like probably the most, at the least in my experience”. 

Evan was inspired to create his fragrance channel in 2020 after looking for out an internet review of a bottle of Stetson cologne. 4 years and tons of of videos later, Evan, who lives in Arkansas and prefers to go by his first name just for privacy purposes, is now one in every of the leading male influencers in the web fragrance sphere, with close to at least 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 began this page because I desired to grow my confidence,” Evan says, “and now I’m just attempting to help other people grow their confidence.”

Evan’s reach is sizable, but he’s removed from the one influencer tapping right into a growing audience of young, male fragrance fans. Ash Kirkland of Gents Scents commands over 460,000 subscribers on YouTube, where he posts each day 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 worth of “beast mode” perfumes to his 220,000-plus audience.

“They’re really brutally honest,” says Elaina Herpel, head of partnerships at area of interest fragrance retailer Twisted Lily. “And I believe lots of men – and as we’ve been seeing them grow to be younger and younger – really appreciate the guidance they’ll get from them.”

The last decade has seen many fragrance brands forgo the ‘sex sells’ promoting that dominated the early 00s, and as a substitute adopt unisex branding and values like ingredient transparency and “clean” formulations. But the web 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 reasonably old-school motivation in selecting a fragrance: garnering compliments, specifically from the other sex.

“The videos you see going viral repeatedly are like, ‘Oh my god, this fragrance got me chased down the road. This got me folded like a lawn chair,’” says influencer Emelia O’Toole, also often known as Professor Perfume. While O’Toole doesn’t consider fragrance must be divided by gender, she says she is usually asked to supply scent recommendations for men. “As women, once we prepare for a date, we’ve got all this stuff at our disposal that make us feel at our greatest,” says Herpel. “Whereas for men, I believe they really lean on the fragrance piece to feel their most confident and be who they need to be that night.”

While men may traditionally have had fewer tools than women to spice up their looks, they are usually not exempt from social pressures to measure up. Increasingly, unrealistic body standards – physiques once reserved for the likes of skilled bodybuilders and fictional superheroes – have gotten the brand new normal, leading many young men to show to social media for recommendations on “looksmaxxing” and other incel-adjacent practices like mewing.

There’s a tipping point, nevertheless, between helping young men feel more confident and promoting pick-up artist-adjacent values. Evan of Fragrance Knowledge, for his part, tries to maintain his channel family-friendly, staying away from curse words and terms like “panty-droppers”, believing it sends the mistaken message to his young male audience. However the origins of the male fragrance influencer will 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 a couple of.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 Yr 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 lots of young men who were watching,” says O’Toole of Jeremy’s influence. “I’ve seen a few teenagers pop up wearing blazers, doing like fragrance on the road 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 recent generation, one with increasingly refined taste. A Jeremy Fragrance Instagram reel from earlier this yr 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 predicated in South Dakota, recalls a recent visit to Latest 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 used to be standing there after which they left without buying anything,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘That’s so teenage boy.’”

Herpel, whose company is owned by the US distributor for area of interest perfume labels like Xerjoff and Mancera, notes there was an uptick in boys as young as 17 asking to smell those brands at department shops. And that’s despite the undeniable fact that a bottle of, say, Xerjoff Alexandria II — one in every of Evan’s favourite scents — starts at $325. “I believe younger persons are increasingly willing to speculate within the items that they really feel are going to make a difference of 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 believe that that may translate to fragrance too.”

Wearing a superb cologne can definitely be an avenue to feeling more confident, Evan acknowledges. But for all his love of fragrance, even he advises his followers to not consider the hype they see online. “Most of my comments are, ‘Which cologne do you think that will get me compliments from women?’ And I at all times reply, ‘An excellent smile.’”