If the sprays imparted that tiny bit of confidence, if they helped gangly tweens lurch their way toward adulthood, what was the harm? As it turns out, we’re still asking.Īxe was officially born in 1983, in France, under personal care behemoth Unilever, which launched the line with three original scents: Amber, Musk, and Spice. That was the feeling of dousing your barren chest in two ounces of uncut manstank. 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. To America’s horniest pubescents, it didn’t matter that the ads weren’t “real.” It only mattered that the body spray was. 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. Axe would have anthropologists believe that its target audience was 20-something men for whom quick-draw sexual episodes were a semi-regular occurrence in fact, the brand’s power user was a 13-year-old boy with a mom who humored him. Part of these ads’ charisma rests on misdirection.
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There’s the one with the guy made of chocolate who gets licked in a darkened movie theater. There’s the one in which an attractive spokeswoman spanks herself with the arm of a mannequin she just demo-sprayed. (Axe rebranded in 2016, and although it still enjoys annual global revenues of more than $1 billion - comparable to a decade ago - it has posted year-over-year declines in the cultural cachet department.) Nevertheless, those 2000s-era commercials continue to notch thousands of views on YouTube.
Today, the iconic ad campaign feels fossilized, obsessed with a bygone vision of masculinity. It was a winning formula: Axe sold $71 million worth of bottled machismo in 2006, just four years after entering the US market. 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. 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. Over the next decade, Axe evolved to include deodorant sticks, shower gels, and hair care.
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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. Almost 20 years later, it hasn’t managed to shake its association with the scent of middle school.
A body spray meant to split the difference between deodorant and cologne, Axe bulldozed the senses with a fragrance so strong it seemed to precede the bodies it clung to - like Febreze, or a bad reputation. Hollywood was bullish on Seann William Scott.Īnd then, in 2002, Axe arrived.
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LimeWire made Shaggy’s entire discography free and accessible. Was there ever a time more suited to the whims of a male American teen than the early aughts? The video game Grand Theft Auto III had just shipped. Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
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