Ask any woman with a teenage son, a twenty-something partner or a male colleague under forty whether something has changed in how the men in her life are approaching fragrance, and you will hear the same answer. They are spraying more. They are buying more. They are watching videos about it. They are talking about fragrance in an evangelical way. The most discreet weapon in a woman’s arsenal, the perfume bottle as identity, has somewhere in the last three years become a young male obsession.
I have wanted to understand this for a while. So I invited Finn Batchelor on the show. Finn is twenty-three. His combined following across social media platforms is over a million. His authority in the male fragrance space is genuine, his opinions are unfiltered, and the videos he has been making since he was eighteen have helped shape a generation of new fragrance consumers. He came on the podcast to explain the deeper forces behind the shift, and his three-driver framework is the cleanest map of this moment I have come across. I loved his point of view and his genuine passion for the art of scent.
Force one: self-improvement, redefined
Young men, Finn told me, are in the middle of a quiet cultural reset around how they present themselves. Gen Z men drink less than their predecessors. They are getting into reading. They are paying attention to grooming, to fitness, to how they show up. The label looksmaxing gets used a lot on TikTok, but the underlying behaviour is broader than that. It’s intentionality.
“Fragrance can be the first step for a lot of young men. You spray on a cologne, it is convenient, it is easy. You boost your self-confidence by doing that. Self-improvement and cologne go hand in hand.” – Finn Batchelor
What I love about this read is how unsentimental it is. The fragrance is not the goal. The fragrance is the keystone of a more deliberate version of the self that the young man is in the process of building. The brand he picks signals what he wants to project. The act of selecting at all signals that he has decided to project something on purpose. He has style and he has taste and that he is comfortable with attention. That’s a very different consumer from the man who used to settle with a nice smelling deodorant or buy wear the aftershave his mother or girlfriend gifted him.
Force two: community, in places the rest of us are not looking
The second driver is community, and it is happening in places older fragrance fans largely do not visit. Reddit fragrance forums, Discord servers and yes, the manosphere. Finn himself runs a free Discord where several thousand of his followers, most of them young men, swap recommendations, compare notes and trade decants of fragrances they cannot quite justify a full bottle of yet.
This is the still misunderstood infrastructure of the male fragrance boom and Finn is their leader. The traditional fragrance journey was solitary and even awkward for this cohort. You walked into a department store, usually with your girlfriend, a sister or mother. You spoke to a sales assistant who spoke in a language you didn’t understand. The current male fragrance journey is communal from the first search. There is a built-in audience to discuss every spritz with and these conversations extend to locker rooms and school playgrounds. The hobby has the social architecture of a fantasy football league, but the business of this boom is real.
Force three: accessibility, and the names you have not heard
Finn tells me that the third driver is price. The gateway fragrances of the male boom are generally not Dior or Tom Ford. The dominant entry-level brands in this market right now are names I had not heard. Bougé Rami, an Australian house with over four hundred fragrances starting at around forty-five Australian dollars. Lattafa, the biggest Middle Eastern fragrance brand in the world, sold in over a hundred countries, retailing in Australia around sixty dollars and considerably less elsewhere.
These are not dupes of designer fragrances pretending to be the originals, though some are clones in the technical sense. They are credible, well-composed fragrances that perform at multiples of their price point and have given an entire demographic permission to start collecting before they could otherwise have afforded to. Lynx has been swapped out for real fragrance and the thrill of this entry is real. The accessibility ceiling has dropped and then behaviours have followed.
The fragrance wardrobe as the new male sartorial unit
Finn frames his own collection through the now-popular language of the fragrance wardrobe. The dark, slightly mysterious fragrance for a suit and tie. The clean, office-safe scent for a workday, which in his case is the classic Prada L’Homme he has worn at least once a week for over two years. Finn has impeccable taste. The dramatic, projection-heavy scent like Mind Games Prodigy for the evenings he is in a confident mood and can wear it without it wearing him.
“If you are not in a confident mood and you do not really feel yourself, I actually feel more self-conscious wearing it than if I had nothing on at all. It just does not feel right. But if I am in a good mood and I wear something like that, it just enhances it.” – Finn Batchelor
This is the same logic the most fragrance-literate women I know have been articulating for years from their own collections. The dedicated wearer assigns a separate scent to her gym, her workday, her date night. She reaches for warmer fragrances when she wants her aura to lead with warmth. The fragrance wardrobe is not a new invention. The young male audience has simply adopted it with unusual enthusiasm.
Why “you smell amazing” is the compliment of the moment
The numbers tell you how recent this shift is and how fast it is moving. Barclays’ Man in the Mirror report found that men’s beauty and grooming spending grew 9.9% in 2024, nearly double the women’s market at 5.8%, with Gen Z men driving the acceleration. NielsenIQ has gone further and credited Gen Z’s habit of curating a fragrance wardrobe, rather than wearing one signature scent, as the single biggest behaviour change reshaping the category. Despite all of that, fragrance is still optional for most men, and that is exactly why “you smell amazing” has become the compliment of the moment. It is doing work nothing else does.
Finn’s read on why you smell amazing has become such a coveted compliment is that it is doing work nothing else does.
Everyone wears clothes. Most people manage their hair, but fragrance, especially for a man, is still optional. The compliment marks the wearer as someone who chose, on purpose, to add something most people skip.
It also feels personal in a way other compliments do not. Telling someone they smell amazing is pretty intimate and hugely affirmative. It signals you got close enough to know, and attracted enough to say something. Most people, even when they smell something nice on a passing colleague, do not say anything because it crosses an invisible line. When the compliment does land, it lands harder.
What the male fragrance boom is really telling us
The temptation is to read the male fragrance moment as a TikTok-era trend. Finn’s account argues the opposite, and I think he is right. What’s happening with young men is what was always going to happen once fragrance became collectable, communal and affordable at the entry level. The same forces are quietly reshaping how everyone else interacts with the category too. The fragrance wardrobe is becoming the dominant model. The signature scent is no longer the only legitimate way to wear perfume and yes the men are being experimental and dabble in layering.
The men coming into the category now will be its biggest spenders in ten years and, in many cases, the ones picking up perfume for the women in their lives. It is worth knowing what they are watching and who they are listening to. Finn Batchelor is one of the people writing the playbook.
Listen to the full conversation with Finn Batchelor on the Ageless Radiance Club podcast.
