When he was 13 years old, Tristan Rodriguez was stopped for photos while on a family trip to Universal Studios. He’s not a celebrity. He just reviews cologne online.
Rodriguez, now 17, is known across social media as That Fragrance Kid, posting videos from his bathroom in his parents’ Litchfield Park, Ariz., home or from department store aisles, unboxing, spraying and rating scents as he comes across them. A high school junior, he belongs to a generation of boys who have traded Axe body spray for expensive bottles from brands like Yves Saint Laurent and Prada, and they aren’t shy about documenting it.
Amid Gen Z’s growing appetite for expensive fragrance — a boom that is unexpectedly being driven by men — Rodriguez isn’t just buying cologne. He’s building a business around it.
“I’ve always wanted to make videos for fun and just play around and post stuff online,” he tells Yahoo. Then he discovered the popular and eccentric influencer Jeremy Fragrance (real name Daniel Schütz), and decided to turn his attention to scents. “I got my first cologne and was super-excited to review it online, but I didn’t think I would have gotten this far.”
Now gifted fragrances from luxury brands like Dior show up at his door. Some brands pay between $500 and $1,500 for Rodriguez to post a video. What began as a hobby has become income and a follower count of nearly 378,000.
And his trajectory signals something bigger: Fragrance has become an accessible, monetizable entry point into the beauty economy for Gen Z men, fueled by self-improvement culture and supercharged by TikTok.
In their influencer era
For years, beauty influencing skewed female. Makeup tutorials and “get ready with me” videos dominated YouTube and Instagram, turning daily routines into revenue streams. Now cologne is giving young men a lane of their own.
Evan Hall, 23, who runs fragrance content under the title Fragrance Knowledge, started posting on TikTok at 18. Like Rodriguez, he was inspired by Jeremy Fragrance, who has 10 million TikTok followers. Before long, Hall realized he needed a fresher angle.
“I didn’t have that much money,” he tells Yahoo. “So I was like, I’m gonna let these guys talk about the $200-plus fragrances. I’m gonna talk about anything under $50.”
A decade ago, fragrance influencing was largely a hobbyist culture on YouTube. Early creators like Ashton Kirkland of Gent Scents approached scent as collectors. Videos were long, detailed and focused on notes, longevity and craftsmanship. Not all the content was highbrow — the most viral posts typically promised attraction hacks, like naming scents that might make the wearer more attractive.
“The best-performing videos would be like ‘10 panty dropper fragrances,’” Kirkland tells Yahoo. “It was the cheat code mentality.”
But during the rise of TikTok, the framing shifted. For younger creators like Hall and Rodriguez, cologne isn’t just about seduction. It’s positioned as one pillar in a broader conversation about leveling up.
“We talk about going to the gym, eating healthy, getting your steps in,” Hall says. “It’s not just about wearing a fragrance. It’s about wearing a fragrance to help improve you a little bit and then taking other steps to self-improvement.”
In an era of “looksmaxxing” and algorithm-driven aspiration, self-improvement content performs and sells. Fragrance is marketed as a tool in a personal optimization routine. And compared with cosmetic procedures or extreme fitness transformations, a bottle of cologne feels more affordable and attainable. That repositioning has made scent content more relatable to teenage boys and more lucrative for the creators guiding them.
The business of smelling good
On corners of TikTok where young men trade gym routines, haircut advice and style tips, scent has become one of the easiest enhancements. It requires no surgery, no trainer, no transformation arc. Just a purchase.
“You look good, you feel good, you smell good,” says Ciara Strickland, a content creator and client strategist at a social media marketing agency. “That’s something the younger generation has really taken to heart. They see these guys who look put together and talk about fragrance, and they want to mimic that.”
Strickland says scent has been reframed online as a kind of performance enhancer that’s less about luxury for luxury’s sake and more about confidence, attraction and status. That reframing is good for engagement, but it’s even better for sales.
TikTok Shop has turned fragrance into a frictionless revenue stream. Affiliate links sit beneath videos. A scroll becomes a purchase. A recommendation becomes a commission. “Using affiliate links is your best friend. You make money while you sleep,” says Strickland.
“The first year of TikTok Shop, I made like $60,000,” Hall says.
A new kind of career path
Though Hall arguably stumbled into this kind of work, the expansion of male influence and the profitability of self-improvement have made social media a more enticing career path for young men. For Oscar Almaraz, 21, it’s how he hopes to provide for his future family.
“I’ve been trying to become a social media influencer for a while,” he tells Yahoo. “This is my dream. This is why I didn’t go to college. I just want to make videos.”
But it wasn’t until he started seeing more fragrance content on his own social media feeds that he realized that would be his way in. His page Just Smell Better is only two years old, and he’s already seeing success. “One TikTok video blew up, and I believe it has now made me around $500 from commission. That’s just money from one video that took me, maybe, one hour to make,” he says.
Sure, Rodriguez laughs when he talks about being recognized at 13. But it’s not lost on him (or the other Gen Z men hot on his influencing trail) that he was earning money before he was old enough to apply for a part-time job — all because of what he was spraying on his wrists.
