Teen Boys Are Becoming the Cologne Industry’s Most Loyal Customers & Have ‘No Shame’ About It

Teen girls are not the only adolescents raiding the aisles of stores that once seemed firmly reserved for adults. While tween and teen girls are stocking up on expensive skincare at Sephora, teen boys are hitting the perfume counter.

“Cologne has become a very big thing that I have no shame being into,” 15-year-old Clive, a fan of Le Labo’s ANOTHER 13, enthuses in the latest conversation of SheKnows’ “Be a Man” series. “I love cologne.”

Indeed, there’s no denying the prevalence of tween-and-teen boy cologne culture. Fragrance is the fastest-growing area of spend in the beauty category among teens, according to a semiannual survey of youth spending patterns by Piper Sandler, with teen boys, in particular, driving growth, according to the New York Times. Even a quick survey of the SheKnows office confirms that so many of our boys — ranging in age from 12 to 17 — are just as at home shopping for fragrance as they are shopping for sports gear — or anything else, honestly.

My own 15-year-old son, Coby, frequently devotes entire paychecks from his part-time job at a local pizza joint to the purchase of luxury fragrances. He has them all meticulously arranged and prominently displayed in a clear plastic bin (ironically, the only tidy spot on his desk). He’s also bought himself a membership to Scentbird, a monthly cologne subscription service that delivers cologne samples in 8 mL vials (and he generously gives the ones he doesn’t like to his 12-year-old brother, an up-and-coming fellow scent aficionado who wears fragrances to elite events such as flag football practice).

In a survey of boys ages 13-19 conducted by SheKnows, nearly half of the teens — just over 46 percent — responded that they wear cologne daily, with only 7 percent responding “rarely” or “never.” The average age that they started wearing cologne was 13-and-a-half, and 75 percent of the respondents said they preferred “woody & earthy” scents (as opposed to just 8 percent who preferred “floral”). The leading scents were Gucci Guilty and YSL — though we did also hear a lot about colognes from Paco Rabanne — and most of the boys preferred to buy their colognes online or at a department or specialty store as opposed to a drugstore, confirming the trend toward luxury brands. Nearly 64 percent reported that they rely on recommendations for new fragrances from marketing (i.e., ads or a spokesperson), with friends coming in a close second at just over 54 percent. Surprisingly, cologne influencers came in third, and were actually tied with parents/guardians at 45 percent — leaving us to marvel at the fact that maybe they do listen to their parents once in a while.

So what’s driving this trend, where boys who are barely into their teens are collecting luxury colognes? Credit (or blame) social media, for starters.

“It’s a new trend highly driven by TikTok,” Emilie Mascarell, Fragrance & Beauty Product Development Consultant at Emilie Consulting, tells SheKnows. Teen boys are “becoming very knowledgeable and are highly interested in designer brands, which they tend to collect and wear throughout the day, including at school. These fragrances have become status symbols, fulfilling their need for belonging among peers.”

Status symbols, indeed. “Gen Z’s are self-proclaimed emotional spenders who are buying their first luxury items at around 15 years old — a full five years sooner than Millennials did,” Kasi Bruno, co-founder of Culture Bureau, a Los Angeles-based strategic consultancy, tells SheKnows. “They’re driving growth in the luxury market and are the least willing to compromise when it comes to buying what they think is best. It’s a generation that has always prided itself on being discerning, and cologne is another category where they’re flexing that knowing, that sophistication.”

According to Bruno, it’s not that far removed from the days of Axe Body Spray or Davidoff Cool Water, “but now there’s more brand awareness, particularly around higher-end, luxury brands,” she says. “In the past, young men were limited to the drugstore or department store and there weren’t many outlets through which to discover new scents. You could talk to your friends, scratch and sniff magazine ads, or walk around spritzing yourself in the store. Fast forward to today and you have TikTok adding so much fuel to the conversation around personal care, grooming, and luxury. These digital manias tend to translate to real-world shopping behaviors across many topics of interest.” 

Certainly, the cologne trend is being led in part by social media influencers who offer tips on “smellmaxxing,” or “enhancing one’s musk,” — though none of the teen boys SheKnows spoke to are fans of that term. (“People don’t use that word,” notes 14-year-old Joan, who wears a cologne called Rabanne Phantom that comes in a silver package shaped like a robot.)

Among the leaders of said cologne influencers are Jeremy Fragrance, who has more than nine million followers on TikTok; TheCologneBoy, a 17-year-old boy with about 1.7 million followers who talks about colognes in the context of feeling “sexy”; Christopher Lee Fragrances, a YouTuber with 411K followers who does cologne reviews and “before you buy” comparisons (yes, kids are getting their recs from YouTube as well); and ThatFragranceKid, a 15-year-old boy with 409k followers who says he got into cologne thanks to Jeremy Fragrance. These influencers use descriptive language to identify the fragrances and often recommend scents for different occasions. However, when asked to describe the scent they were wearing, most of the boys SheKnows spoke with didn’t have intricate descriptions. “I can’t describe it but it just smells really good,” says 17-year-old Jackson of his current favorite cologne, Paco Rabanne 1 Million Lucky.

They may not necessarily be descriptive, but the boys definitely know what they like — and many even change things up for different seasons. Fourteen-year-old Theo informs us that “fruity, fresh scents are good for summer” (his warm-weather pick is Giorgio Armani’s Acqua di Gió), while Maison Margiela’s REPLICA By the Fireplace, a fragrance described as “warm,” “smoky,” “spicy,” and “sophisticated,” is… not. He summed up the importance of seasonal appropriateness: “Pretend you’re walking by a guy who’s, like, super-sweaty … and you’re also sweaty and you’re hot … and then you smell a fireplace. It’s a really nice smell, just not in the summer.”

From a psychological perspective, the cologne trend isn’t surprising. Teenagers typically behave in ways that make them feel older and more mature. In an interview with NPR, Dr. Kim Alexander, clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, noted that wearing cologne helps teens feel more like adults. “We all can recognize moments in our youth where we really longed for adulthood or really longed for that agency and autonomy.”

Surprisingly, the brands at the center of the fragrance trend are not pushing their products on teenagers. In fact, they are staying relatively quiet. Callie Holtermann, reporting on the trend for the New York Times, noted that none of the fragrance brands she reached out to responded to her query. She hypothesizes that there may be a “little bit of uneasiness about being associated with a really young customer.” Mascarell agrees, acknowledging, “While brands are very interested in this trend, they are also aware of how quickly trends can change with social media and how Gen Z tends to have less brand loyalty. So, they need to walk a fine line to maintain their appeal without over-targeting and risking losing their exclusivity.”

Regardless of whether they’re directly appealing to teens, the trend shows no signs of slowing down. One mom of a 12-year-old reports that while her son was packing for summer camp this year, half of his friends were talking about what colognes they’d be bringing. Summer scents, we hope?