Axe just made it way harder to overuse its body spray

There are a few odors from adolescence that are seared into the brains of most Americans who grew up after the 1980s: the aroma of freshly baked brick pizza in the school cafeteria, the acrid stink of a locker room, and the unmistakable scent of teen boys wearing an unforgivable amount of Axe body spray. 

The phenomenon of teens dousing themselves in Axe has become so ubiquitous since the brand’s founding in 1983 that over the past few years it’s inspired its own subgenre of memes (see this one and this one, for example).

Now Axe has its sights set on a new generation of consumers with a redesigned spray mechanism for its signature product.

To mark the occasion, on February 20 the brand announced its self-referential “History of Overdoing It” campaign. “Axe has always been part of the cultural conversation around guys doing too much,” and for years that “included how our body spray was used,” Dolores Assalini, head of Axe U.S., said in a press release.

At last, Axe is offering a solution. According to the Unilever-owned brand, overspraying was always a design problem—and to fix it, the team has invented new “spray technology” to keep offensive odors at bay.

The Axe bottle gets a facelift

Brajin Vazquez, senior manager of DEO formats technology at Unilever—and one of the minds behind the Axe redesign—says the chronic overspraying of Axe’s old product was influenced by a few factors of the bottle’s design. The formulation of the spray, combined with the design of the bottle’s valve and nozzle, resulted in a thick, diffused cloud of fragrance, creating that classic overpowering smell. 

“For years, we’ve heard that while people liked the fragrances, Axe’s spray could feel too heavy or create too much of a cloud,” Vazquez says. “That feedback made us look closely at the delivery system itself. We realized that improving the user experience wasn’t just about messaging, it required updating the spray technology.” 

Vazquez’s team started by rethinking the product’s ingredients. They reduced the amount of propellant gas in the spray and added nitrogen to the mix, which, Vazquez explains, made room for a higher proportion of liquid formula and “created space in the formulation to increase odor-control actives and deliver more fragrance per spray.” Essentially, this means that users can spray less of the product and still get the same body-odor-masking effect.

This new formulation is combined with a reengineered spraying system. The old design, Vazquez says, operated at a high pressure, which resulted in a “stronger, higher-velocity spray.” The new valve component mitigates the problem by keeping the spray’s flow light. The bottle also features a spray insert with a nozzle opening that’s 25% smaller than the old version, allowing users to apply the fragrance to more targeted areas without that dreaded “cloud” effect. 

Realistically, Axe’s retooled design probably won’t solve chronic overspraying altogether—but at least now there are some guardrails in place for a problem that’s plagued middle school hallways for decades.

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