How One Design Killed a Cult Brand
- Caelan Reeves
- May 22
- 5 min read
Boy Smells minimalist, androgynous candles and fragrances decorated everyone’s desks, coffee tables, and vanities. Then came the rebrand.
Boy Smells burst onto the fragrance scene in 2020 with promises of androgyny and subversion. Early reviewers were drawn to the quirky, oblong cap design, the dissonance of the name, and the brand’s Glossier-pink labels. Boy Smells, owned by “real-life and business partners” Matthew Herman and David Kien, was founded as the pair rejected the “normative ‘genderless’ caption to beauty and wellness products” in the mid-2010s.
Boy Smells’ early scents trended towards androgyny, which is different from that “normative ‘genderlessness’” in that it is marked by the presence of dual masculine and feminine signifiers, instead of a lack of any gendered signifiers at all (think blank-slate scents like Byredo’s Blanche). Its popular scents combine floral and leather notes, cardamom and cedarwood, and marijuana and hazelnut. Boy Smells is, as their marketing copy will not let you forget, not genderless, but genderful.
This positioning as a queer-owned niche brand intent on subverting commercialized queerness has come back to bite. In April, the brand rolled out Boy Smells 2.0., a rebrand that included discontinuing old fragrances, releasing a handful of new ones, and changing the packaging design to a smooth bottle with an orb-shaped cap, which went into effect in mid-April. This rebrand came after a period of commercial struggle and was intended to inject the brand with a much-needed capital boost.
When faced with the new basic flourmands and Rhode-esque bottle redesign, fans of the brand took to social media to express their dismay and disappointment. The brand that built its consumer base on a message of transgression is now selling run-of-the-mill flourmands and sugary lactonics in bottles that look right at home in a Glow House Sephora haul. Words like “watered-down” and “Gen Z-algospeak” abound.
Despite such intense online backlash that the brand sent out an ersatz Notes app apology via email, Boy Smells seems to be doing just fine — more than fine, in fact. A brand representative told Glossy that the rebrand wrought Boy Smells’ best sales week in four years. This dissonance might stem from the fact that the rebrand’s target audience is not quite of thinkpiece-writing, Twitter-thread-authoring age. The rounded bottle caps and blown-up logo size are trends popular among tweenage Drunk Elephant enthusiasts, as reported by Beauty Independent and Puck.
The email, however, is littered with language designed to pacify elder Gen Z’s and younger millennials, featuring vocabulary like “self-expression” and “queer-led.” The website copy reads: “Identity isn't static. And neither are we.” The loss of faith, it seems, was among the thinkpiece age group, disappointed with the brand’s abandonment of its androgynous scents like Suede Pony for tooth-rotting marshmallow scents a la Sol de Jainero. The backlash was significant enough to warrant damage control.
Beyond complaints about the new scent profiles — the house of Boy Smells has fallen to the great flourmand influx! — the redesigned packaging is a particularly sore spot. Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto called the new packaging “pearlescent Elf Bars for influencers to tap their nails against.” Artist and perfumehead Daphne Villanueva told HALOSCOPE: “I know the original packaging was fairly controversial in that people hated the oversized cap, but it felt deco-minimalist to me.”
The Boy Smells packaging redesign situates the brand in what Jane Song describes as the “pebble-dagger” dichotomy. As Song points out, 2020s beauty products and interior design display an inclination towards what she calls the pebble, and what I will here call the blobform. From Rhode’s pocket blushes to EOS chapsticks, the dagger-like shape of preceding lip products and eyeliners has been abandoned in favor of a rounded, non-threatening, blob-like product design. Song writes: “[The] pebble represents a sense of absolution from overconsumption.” What harm could be wrought by a bubblegum pink blob?
Notably, as Song and Alioto point out, the cosmetic blobform runs parallel to the design of disposable vapes. A GeekBar, a Rhode blush, a Glossier solid perfume — your hand curls around the blob as if you were a baby instinctively grasping a finger. As suggested by Rhode’s phone case designed to carry its popular lip gloss, the blobform is something you are never meant to put down. The hot pink Flum Pebble is antithetical to the sharp, phallic image of the cigarette. It is addiction — overconsumption — rendered harmless.
This design trend is reminiscent of the humanoid blobforms of Corporate Memphis. You’ve probably seen this art style on Facebook’s login page or in the IBM ads that have littered this basketball season. The Corporate Memphis art style is unnerving in its genderlessness, its race-blindness. It is a half-hearted hand wave towards the human body, exhausted by post-Obama cries for inclusivity in advertising. Here, it says dejectedly as it presents the viewer with sexless purple homunculi rendered in scalable vectors. Fine.
This regression to an aesthetic means of blobforms neutralizes any potential for aesthetic or political subversion. Song walks this out in her piece, as does Cassidy Bensko in her piece on Canva’s dilution of radical aesthetics. The blobform humanoid has no ethnic history, no ostensible sexuality. The pebble blush begs you to forget that “tools of glamour contain power and danger conferred to the user.” Corporate Memphis’ genderless simulacra of the human form, the Flum Pebble, Rare Beauty’s concealers — they all represent a commercial harmlessness. Apropos of nothing, Jia Tolentino’s research into the creative style book of Cocomelon revealed that animators are not allowed to include objects with sharp corners. It is a world where every edge is rounded — it’s a world that cannot hurt you.
Is the rounded redesign of Boysmell’s packaging so significant? So politically fraught? It’s not like Boy Smells has never pushed the envelope. Last Pride Month, the brand released a poppers-themed candle, releasing a Zoom screenshot of the entire marketing team trying poppers as part of its development. In light of the Trump administration’s raids on poppers factories across the U.S., this is a substantively transgressive act, one that Boy Smells’ consumers loved. The brand fell back on this goodwill in the rebrand apology email: “We’re still the same team that brought you poppers-inspired Citrush.”
The brand has been upfront about the commercial motivations for the rebrand while gripping white-knuckled to their philosophy of gendered transgression. The brand told Beauty Independent that they were acquired by a “group of gay investors” in early 2024 to bolster capital. Puck calls the rebrand a “Sephora pet-project” in light of Boy Smells strengthening their partnership with the retailer. The apology email and website copy for the rebrand engage in a complicated balancing act between transgression and profit: “The brand had to evolve in order to survive […] All we ask is that you stick with us throughout this next chapter.” The brand is still, self-professedly, “rooted in genderfulness.”
I hesitate to throw around fighting words like “rainbow capitalism,” even as the phrase “gay investors” readily invites it. The point of a business is to make money, and it is perhaps misguided to source your gendered transgression from the Sephora fragrance aisle, sandwiched in between $100 anti-aging serums and endless iterations of YSL’s Black Opium. Whether or not the rebrand represents a departure from the brand’s nominally transgressive philosophy, it might not be the philosophical implications that have put people off from the rebrand — the new Boy Smells might just not be very good.
Old is the adage of a decrease in product quality following a new round of investors or a venture capital acquisition. Euphemisms like “capital infusion” and “overhead” do little to obscure the reality that profits are higher when a product is cheaper to make. As Alioto told HALOSCOPE, her qualm with the rebrand “[Wasn’t] that they seemed to stray from their stated values, it just looks bad and cheap… look at influencers showing the bottles, the line in the colorblocking isn't clean.” The blobform, it would seem, is the physicalization of cut corners. 🌀
Caelan Reeves is a writer from Chicago. You can find her fragrance writing in HALOSCOPE and High Country News.
