“It’s Monday morning, I’m getting ready for school, so let’s put on a fragrance,” says a 18-year-old fragrance reviewer in an Instagram reel. “Rule number one: always lotion up for the homies,” he continues with a wink while pumping moisturiser into his hand from a jumbo Cetaphil container.
Until a couple of years ago, Jatin Arora, known to his online fans as The Cologne Boy, was just another high-school student in Winnipeg, Canada. On our video call, he recalls how he begged his mom to buy him his first fragrance at age 16, and how, to his surprise, she bought him three. “I was ecstatic. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and I’d just be smelling the fragrances,” he says enthusiastically. In his Zoom backdrop now (which is also the set-up for most of his videos) are floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male torso-shaped bottles, a range of Maison Margiela’s Replica fragrances, and Creed colognes.
About six months after he got his first trio of fragrances, Arora started making regular trips to Sephora to make videos and began growing his collection with discounted perfumes from Costco, Shoppers (a popular retailer in Canada), and other wholesale platforms he found online. “I just wanted to record the journey of me learning about them and then it started to blow up like crazy. I think a year later, I have around 600 fragrances now,” he tells The Nod. At the time of this interview, he has a following of 1.8 million on TikTok, 600k on Instagram, and 160k on YouTube (in just under three months) with his off-the-wall content that often involves antics like slapping the butt of a Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male bottle, speaking in a deep Punjabi accent, and wearing a blonde wig to look like fellow fragrance influencer Jeremy Fragrance in some videos.
“EARLY YOU LOOK HANDSOME 👏👏👏” “This video is leaking with aura.” “AURA 1000000+” are just some of the unhinged comments that ‘fragheads’ regularly leave on his reels. Arora has built a community of fragrance-loving followers who often ask him, via comments on his posts and live sessions, which scent would be suitable for a date, a job interview, or the beginning of a school semester. At school, kids walk up to him to take pictures. “I don’t like to consider myself a celebrity. Other people do, which is insane to me,” he says of his newfound fame. “They look at me and say, ‘You go to my school?!’ And the teachers are supportive because they know that I do this for work, so if I’m just skipping, they kind of mark me present even if I’m not there. You gotta rizz up the teachers, you know.”
You might have seen an article or two floating around about how tween skincare and hygiene has become more than just a facewash, moisturiser, and good ol’ Axe body spray now. Thanks to social media and trends like ‘smellmaxxing’ or ‘scentmaxxing’, teenagers are developing a taste for expensive skincare and cologne. In one of his scentmaxxing videos, Arora recommends showering every day, twice if possible—once in the morning and once before going to bed—applying deodorant, and brushing with a good toothpaste. “It’s common sense, but I see kids in my high school who’ll skip showers for days and then put on fragrances, which makes them stink even more,” he says. Most of his followers are between ages 16 and 26, and 80 per cent are men.
Before becoming one of social media’s biggest fragrance influencers, The Cologne Boy was a magician. “I was actually the No 1 most followed magician on TikTok at one point, until my account got banned because they thought I was under 13. After that, I started learning about fragrance, so I thought why not make content about that? I still do little tricks,” he reveals. Suddenly, he pulls out a deck of cards out of nowhere, which he casually turns into a wad of cash in the blink of an eye. “This is how I afford so many fragrances,” he jokes.
In the prestige beauty sector, fragrance is the fastest-growing category, with double-digit growth in 2023, according to market research firm Circana. Hashtags such as #PerfumeTok on Instagram and TikTok continue to boost the discovery of niche brands and influence social media-driven fragrance purchases among Gen Z consumers, according to the firm’s 2023 Fragrance Consumer Report. So, it’s no surprise there are more and more young content creators jumping onto the fragrance bandwagon. While most influencers are adults, Arora says there are many younger ones as well. “We are all great friends. We collab a lot when brands fly us all out together,” he adds.
Arora's top picks for the summer include Louis Vuitton Afternoon Swim, Parfums de Marly Greenly, and Roja Burlington 1819
Arora is aware not everyone can drop US$300-500 on a bottle of cologne, which is why he started his decanting business last December. “There are two reasons to decant. The first is that people want to try expensive fragrances before buying. Some are sold only on websites, and you have to blind-buy a 500-dollar bottle. Let’s say you buy it and when you smell it, you don’t like it, that’s 500 bucks wasted on a fragrance you cannot even use or return. The other is, some people just don’t want to commit to a full bottle because they know they’re gonna move on from it and they know they cannot finish a fragrance that fast. For a guy who doesn’t wear fragrances every day, a 10ml decant would last him maybe a year,” he explains.
Until recently, Arora’s routine included waking up early in the morning to pack orders, going to school, coming back and packing more orders, and then going to the post office to ship them before it closed at 8 pm. He sometimes packs orders live on Instagram and TikTok, where viewers share their order numbers and request him to pack their orders in front of an audience. Most of his customers are 17–18-year-olds purchasing samples of Emporio Armani’s Stronger With You Intensely eau de parfum (a warm, woody fragrance), 9pm by Afnan (which combines floral, fruity, and spicy notes), and Azzaro’s Most Wanted (a sweet, woody amber scent described by the brand as ‘the ultimate weapon of seduction’).
Now that he’s graduated from high school, I ask him about his plans for college. “I haven’t thought of that because I’ve had my hands so full with content creation,” he explains. At 18, he has taken up fragrances full-time and is actively working with brands like L’Oréal, Saint Laurent, and Chanel. Although Instagram and TikTok don’t pay content creators directly in Canada, he does make money through paid promotions, TikTok live streams when viewers donate, and subscriptions for exclusive content on Instagram. “With YouTube, it’s a completely different story. I think you need about 4,000 hours of watch time and about 1,000 subscribers. Then they analyse your channel, go through all your content, and say, ‘Okay, this guy comes into the beauty niche. So, we’ll assign him this much CPM (cost per mile) per 1,000 views’,” he explains. Things have been going well enough for Arora to be able to ask his mom to retire; she now helps him look at contracts for brand deals. “I want to be able to make sure I level up the game and put more time into this.”
I ask him if he’s thought about a career in perfumery. “I tell my viewers what I like, and they like the same thing. We kinda have similar tastes, so I know which fragrances are already doing well and have the best notes. Of that, I’m planning on making my own. Let’s just say it’s in the works.”
