The sexiest men’s fragrance in 2024 is…floral?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Women stop Jacob Jiang, a fashion-design student, on the streets of London all the time. Not to inquire about his Rick Owens jeans, but about his scent—Do Son, by Diptyque—which they want for themselves and the men in their lives.

“I think they like it because it’s not a scent used by most dudes," Jiang, 25, said of the unisex fragrance he picked up three years ago. Featuring tuberose, a white bloom with an intense aroma, it reminds him of “a bamboo forest." Jiang would have fit in centuries ago, when gentlemen often smelled like flowers. In the 18th century, monks in Cologne—the German city that gave cologne its name—brewed fragrant tonics from citrus rinds and flower petals.

And according to fragrance legend, in the 19th century Napoleon charged into battle doused in a cologne thick with rosemary and lavender. Though florals have frequently appeared in men’s fragrances since then, they’ve often taken a back seat to more overtly “masculine" ingredients. In the last 50 years, countless men’s mass fragrances have not so much been plucked from the garden as exhumed from the golf club, infused with notes of woods, whiskeys, smoke and leather.

But lately, younger taste-making guys have stopped to smell the roses (and violets and nerolis and geraniums). They’re spritzing themselves with “flower-forward" fragrances, which in industry speak means floral top notes are the first thing one smells. These concoctions, typically unisex formulas from smaller brands, can read sweet, tangy or even metallic.