Me, I discovered Axe the usual way, through my year-old nephew, for whom the whole prospect of a lifetime of boom-chicka-wah-wah is perhaps still too much to contemplate. My own boys, at 8 and 10, are too young for Axe, or for fragrance, or for wah-wahs of any variety — or so I shall insist to myself until they are But after a day at the beach when they shared a bathroom with their big hockey-playing Axe-scented cousin-slash-hero, even the 8-year-old was smearing his small hairless self with the body wash, the deodorant, and, in case he still couldn't be smelled from the next pier over, the spray cologne.
Dinners quickly became unbearable, with three Axe-drenched young people fogging up all tastes and smells until your pasta simply tasted like the painful ache at the back of your tongue that occurs when every boy in the house sees a daily Axe dip as part of his grooming. On it went, until the final weekend at the beach, when I found myself trapped in the shower with only a bottle of three-in-one Axe product shampoo, body wash, and conditioner.
So I broke down and used it. It was the most sublimely powerful fragrance experience of my adult life. After decades of smelling like a flower or a fruit, for the first time ever, I smelled like teen boy spirit. I smelled the way an adolescent male smells when he feels that everything good in the universe is about to be delivered to him, possibly by girls in angel wings. I had never smelled this entitled in my life. I loved it. I wanted more. I confess that it was hard to choose a fragrance.
My year-old nephew advised me to steer clear of the "nasty grossness"-scented products. All of the Axe scents, to the extent that they differ, seem to be mostly named after manly activities like mining or soldering.
Ultimately I opted for Cool Metal see: mining and soldering in the body wash, shampoo and spray formulations. What happens when a fortysomething women walks around smelling like a year-old boy for a week? Mostly nothing. Its introduction to drugstore aisles was attended by a series of notorious ad campaigns built on naughty jokes and blunt promises, the crux of them involving a parade of women lusting after some schmo.
Over the next decade, Axe evolved to include deodorant sticks, shower gels, and hair care. But even as its product line began to reflect the refined grooming habits and shifting sensibilities of the modern metrosexual man , its branding stuck to old-school attitudes about romance. In ads suggesting that its scents would overpower all resistance, Axe pitched itself as artillery for a perpetual battle of the sexes — the howitzer of attraction.
Today, the iconic ad campaign feels fossilized, obsessed with a bygone vision of masculinity. Nevertheless, those s-era commercials continue to notch thousands of views on YouTube. Glimpsed from the vantage point of the MeToo era, Axe looks like a spasm of late patriarchy, but its legacy is complicated by the women who helped develop and champion it and the environment that teen boys fostered with it.
The scents smelled like what they had been told men should smell like: patchouli and sandalwood and musk; like Burt Reynolds in that famous Cosmo centerfold. That was the feeling of dousing your barren chest in two ounces of uncut manstank. If the sprays imparted that tiny bit of confidence, if they helped gangly tweens lurch their way toward adulthood, what was the harm? Axe was officially born in , in France, under personal care behemoth Unilever, which launched the line with three original scents: Amber, Musk, and Spice.
But the brand as we know it today was born 12 years later when the company handed advertising duties to hip London agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in For trademark reasons, Axe is called Lynx in the UK and a few other countries. The brand needed a facelift. It was irony. The brand was already gesturing, clumsily, toward seduction, but that only got you so far.
Nobody believed a body spray could single-handedly seal the deal for its wearer. Leaning into the absurdity of that proposition let BBH deliver its message with a fat wink. The women would be stunners. That was the joke: The starker the hotness differential, the more it beggared belief, the more clearly the ads would present as self-aware.
I mean, the background to all this is they were very insecure. There are elaborate cocktails, freestanding pieces of art, finger foods. Axe promises not just to help boys get the girl, but to help them navigate a world that punishes inexperience. Take as a given that teenage boys are deathly afraid of their perceived immaturity. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.
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