January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Teen boys picking up the scent
Young guys want to smell nice too
“Axe is one of my favourite things in life,” he said. “You don’t want to be smelling bad in class.”
He’s 13. He wears outfits, not clothes. And he has one scent for every day.
And one for, well, you know, special occasions.
“Sometimes when you wear it,” said Milai Henriet, his middle school classmate, “the ladies will turn their heads at you.”
Milai is 12.
Seems that Axe body spray has become the thing for today’s discriminating middle school boy. Preteen boys barely registered in the billion-dollar personal grooming market just a few years ago. But analysts say younger and younger boys are snapping up body sprays — lighter and often less expensive versions of cologne — in greater numbers than ever before.
Karen Grant, senior beauty industry analyst with the NPD Group, a market research company, said that when workers at her firm began analyzing the market in 2002, they were looking at trends among females, but to their surprise, they discovered teenage boys were also into fragrance.
Moms report being dragged to drugstores to pick up cans of the spray--in all of its “nine unique fragrances.” Principals groan and roll their eyes when asked about the “Axe effect.” “Let me just tell you,' said John Burley, a principal in suburban Gaithersburg, Maryland, “there are days when I walk down the eighth-grade hallway ... and I am nearly asphyxiated.”
And it is Axe that is the brand du jour. Although manufacturer Unilever maintains that its target market is men between 18 and 24, boys as young as 11 are dousing themselves in the spray that “leaves guys smelling great so they can concentrate on more important things — like how to get the girl.”
The suggestion — that Axe will help with the ladies — is woven throughout its marketing and advertising and may be why company officials declined to comment on the body spray’s appeal to younger teens.
Make no mistake, even among Year Six, girls are a big part of the Axe effect.
“I was watching the commercial, and there was this guy and he was mobbed by a bunch of girls, and I thought, ‘Wow, that's tight!’” said Asean Townsend, 12.
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