Class of '24
There’s a curious beauty phenomenon happening among tween boys, discovers Justine Cullen — and it smells like amber fougere
PHOTOGRAPHY by PETE DALY
A massive new market is opening up in the world of beauty and it’s not coming from sustainability advocates or biotech experts, but from a much more unexpected demographic: tween boys. I first got wind of the phenomenon when my 11-year-old son – a child who has never shown the slightest interest in what he wears, how he looks and most definitely not how he smells – asked me an unusual question. “You know at your work how sometimes you get perfume,” he said. “Would you have the one called Zherper Gooteter?”
I took a second to respond. Since when did this child – who almost every evening answers my request to go and have a shower with an incredulous “but I had one yesterday!” – even know the word ‘perfume’?
But, also – ‘Zherper Gooteter’? Was there a new niche fragrance brand that I’d never heard of, but that this 11-year-old – who only yesterday had made himself literally vomit by fitting an entire bag of marshmallows in his mouth at once and trying to swallow the lot whole – had?
Clockwise from top left: JEAN PAUL GAULTIER Le Beau EDT, from $130, Le Beau Paradise Garden EDP, from $140, and Le Male Elixir Parfum, from $200.
He clocked my confusion and started to doubt himself. “Yeah, Zherpa Gooteter. Or something like that. Jah Pah Goobair. No, Jah Pah Gooter. The one with the body.”
And that’s when I realised he was referring to, or trying to refer to, Jean Paul Gaultier. Specifically, Le Male, the JPG fragrance famous for its bottle in the shape of a hunky male torso. This only made me more confused. Up until the moment in question, this child’s interests were limited to basketball, binging MrBeast content and wiping his boogers on the wall behind his bed where he thinks they can’t be seen, not necessarily in that order. He considers conditioner as both too fancy and a punishment device. Why the sudden interest in a $125 fragrance, let alone one from 1995, let alone one whose original iconic striped sailor campaign was inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 film Querelle, the main character of which was described by Gaultier as a “hypersexualised gay symbol”. The whole thing felt... off brand.
That night, I got some answers. At a barbecue with friends, one told me that on a recent family trip to Japan, her 13-year-old surf-mad son didn’t spend a cent because he was saving his money to buy fragrance in the duty-free hall back in Sydney. Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille, Versace Pour Homme and Bleu de Chanel, he later told me proudly. (Many of the boys I’d go on to ask about their newly acquired fragrance obsession would name Bleu; I think they like the mouthfeel.) He was not the only one. I heard from other parents that while last year the boys would descend on Woolies after school, where the big thing to buy was an 80 cent packet of home-brand wafer biscuits (2023, such a simpler time!), now they were going to Chemist Warehouse en masse to gaze at the latest bottles behind the glass like they were a new drop of Nimbus 2000s. Later that week at parent-teacher night, one of the teachers told me the Year 5 and 6 boys all bring their favourite bottles to school and spritz during the day, leaving the classrooms reeking with a combination of expensive perfume and prepubescent hormone stank, like the ground floor of David Jones meets-a PE change room – reiterating once and for all that we really do need to pay our teachers more. Perfumes, as it turns out, have become the latest collectable trend for younger teen and tween boys; a modern day version of Pokémon cards or those little finger skateboards – but just wildly more expensive and a lot more intense for the people sharing their close living quarters.
I thought at first that maybe the fad was a confined local thing, maybe sparked by some particularly influential older kid with a niche interest or a couple of chic gay dads, until my sister on the other side of the city told me that my nephew in Year 8 had suddenly discovered perfumes as well. Then a colleague reported that her son in Year 7 and in another part of the city altogether also came home asking for JPG. And to confirm it all, a month or so later The New York Times ran a story called ‘Need a New Cologne or Fragrance? Ask a Teen Boy’, in which they explained the world of ‘smellmaxxing’.
I suppose it was inevitable that boys’ beauty curiosity would be sparked at some point, when all the girls they’re just starting to try to impress are already level 2 Mecca Beauty Loop-ers, with skincare routines to rival any grown adult. But still, a global phenomenon of 10- to 14-year-old boys in the suburbs spending up big on designer perfume was probably not a thing any of us expected, especially during a cost-of-living crisis. Not that the shift is just about perfume. If you haven’t heard of mewing – originally an exercise that aimed to create a stronger jawline but mostly now just an IYKYK gesture they make to ruin family photographs – consider yourself lucky. They’re all obsessed with a very particular haircut called a low taper fade. You might think you don’t know it, but if you’ve driven past a bunch of tween boys lately, you do: they nearly all have a version of it. That haircut and its older, more peacocky brother, the broccoli (google it), has led to most of them becoming experts in hair product, especially texture sprays and powders. There’s a viral TikTok featuring a guy blow-drying his fringe underneath a cap to get the perfect-shaped flick, and it’s hard to overstate what a shift this is: last year, these were kids for whom crawling under a supermarket door and tackling each other to get their hands on a rare bottle of Prime energy drink was considered the pinnacle of cool; this year, they’re following beauty tutorials.
“A global PHENOMENON of 10- to 14-year-old boys in the suburbs spending up big on DESIGNER PERFUME was probably not a thing any of us expected, especially during a COST-OF-LIVING CRISIS”
It is, in a very small way, a trickle-down effect from the whole new, somewhat scary world of male vanity (not restricted to this age group) known as ‘looksmaxxing’ – the idea of maximising one’s physical attractiveness that stems from incel forums online but has had more mainstream attention over the past couple of years via TikTok. Within looksmaxxing you have ‘softmaxxing’ – practices such as making improvements to personal hygiene, dressing more stylishly, going to the gym and following skincare routines – and the more extreme version known, of course, as ‘hardmaxxing’, involving things like cosmetic surgery and steroid use. Then there’s ‘auramaxxing’, the adoption of classic self-improvement techniques like journalling and mantras – as well as some less classic techniques such as talking and laughing less or, um, “having a semi in public” – to become more attractive (questionable) from the inside out. In comparison to all the other -maxxing behaviours, the idea of smellmaxxing is child’s play, quite literally.
Which brings me back to JPG. While this is not a new scent (although there are constant new variants) and it’s definitely not aimed at a pre teen, it’s fascinating that of all the possible fragrances, this is the one they’ve latched onto the hardest and fastest, and it perfectly sums up the speed at which things are moving in this space. On TikTok, ‘Jean Paul Gaultier’ was searched only 53,000 times worldwide in the first quarter of 2023, as opposed to 8.8 million times in the first quarter of 2024. Similarly, #jeanpaulgaultier garnered 80 million video views in the first quarter of 2023, versus 1.3 billion in the same quarter of 2024. A viral sound bite from the animated movie Megamind (a film released in 2010, coincidentally the year many of these new fans were born) in which Minion asks Will Ferrell’s character “Are you wearing Jean Paul Gaultier Pour Homme?” gave fans of the scent something to run with, as did a case of mistaken identity between hugely popular TikTok creator Jeremy Fragrance and a man he approached on the beach who he thought was “Jean Paul Gaultier himself” (he wasn’t). But two viral moments don’t go all the way to explaining the hold that this particular scent has over this demographic right at this particular moment in time. Jean Paul Gaultier is now the third most popular male fragrance brand in Australia, spearheaded by Le Male – and it’s 30 years old, which in a world of constant newness makes it an absolute unicorn.
The reasons must have fragrance marketers around the world scratching their heads, but theories abound. Le Male is categorised as an amber fougere scent, but it’s got a creamy, vanilla base and a hint of sweetness that can’t hurt in appealing to a younger consumer (girls in this age demographic are big fans of vanilla-based scents, too). It also has a unique and recognisably minty top note, an important factor when you’re 12 and have invested all your pocket money on a status perfume, because what’s even the point if no one can tell that you’re wearing it? Multiple variations with differently dressed (or undressed) bottles are available at any one time, making it collectable, tradable – a bit like the Funko Pops they only just grew out of – and appealing to a generation that is only just starting to work out what self-expression means to them. And I suspect that the bottle itself, with all of its overt, assertive masculinity, could be appealing to something deeper inside the boys of this demographic who are just grappling with what it means to even be a man, especially in 2024 when everything they see in the news, from unhinged politicians to gendered violence, reflects negatively on masculinity, and decent role models seem to be few and far between. With everything that’s going on, is it any wonder they’re looking to an idealised projection of manhood to help them get there? Better Le Male – a perfume that actually smells good and has long celebrated queerness and individualism – than, like, Andrew Tate. Or, for that matter, Zherper Gooteter.
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