Spend any amount of time browsing fragrance content online — forums, Discord channels, “PerfumeTok” — and you’re bound to come across an oft-repeated phrase: “beast mode.”
“Hi guys give me your best beast mode picks [sic],” wrote one user on Fragrantica, an online perfume encyclopedia and forum where users can post their own reviews and log their personal fragrance collection. “For months I’ve been gathering a list of my most beast mode, favorite perfumes,” prefaced fragrance creator @kathleenlights in a TikTok video viewed over 800,000 times.
Clearly, “beast mode” is a hot topic among perfume lovers. But the term isn’t intrinsic to perfume discourse: According to The New Republic, it can be traced back to the 1988 launch of Altered Beast, a video game. In it, players could collect power-ups that would transform them into one of five magical beasts, a feature that fans of the game ostensibly began calling “beast mode.” Then, in the 2007, former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch — then an undergrad at Berkeley — told an interviewer that he was in “beast mode” while on the field. (Beast Mode would eventually become his nickname.)
Since the early 2010s, beast mode has generally come to denote someone or something powerful and aggressive. It’s not entirely surprising, then, that a certain circle of hyper-masculine fragrance bloggers — think Jeremy Fragrance, Darian Hill of the YouTube channel BowTie FragranceGuy, and Dallas Dundra of Chaos Fragrance — adopted the term to extoll the virtues of strong, long-lasting perfumes. Typically, a “beast mode fragrance” lasts upwards of eight hours and emits a powerful sillage, or scent trail.
Now, “beast mode” posturing is trickling into a wider community of perfume lovers who view long-lasting scents not as an expression of masculinity, but as a cost-saving measure.
According to Emma Vernon, the host of fragrance podcast “The Perfume Room,” the reign of beast mode fragrance is a microcosm of larger economic anxieties. “Not to bring up the election but, as we’ve learned, inflation and cost of living are indeed the top ballot issues for many Americans,” she says, explaining that beast mode fragrances are often perceived as more practical and cost-effective than something quieter. Potent, in-your-face perfumes require one spray versus several to be perceived by both wearer and bystander — therefore, they appear to offer more use per spritz. “At a time when consumers are looking to cut costs in their lives, elective spending, for most, requires some element of function.”
The trend is having tangible effects on the industry. For the past year, fragrance brands, niche and designer alike, have catered to consumer interest in longevity and sillage by releasing stronger versions, or flankers, of their most popular scents. They’re often marketed as “absolus” or “elixirs,” flowery ways of indicating that they’re extrait de parfums, a class of fragrance that contains a higher percentage of perfume oil compared to eau de colognes, eau de toilettes, and eau de parfums.
For the most part, creators and shoppers frame beast mode fragrances as better from both a value and quality perspective. But to Vernon, a fragrance with extended longevity and strong sillage is not inherently superior to a more understated one. She adds that the marketing around the deluge of beast mode flankers is “a bit cannibalizing… it’s sort of an admission that the original wasn’t enough.” Vernon prefers flankers “that are different enough from the original that you’d want both in your collection.” She cites Silky Woods Elixir, a stronger, woodier take on Silky Woods by Goldfield & Banks, as one of her personal favorites.
At the same time, Vernon won’t write off beast mode fragrance entirely. “To view perfume strictly as art is a luxury. To view it strictly as functional removes the joy. I think the sweet spot for most consumers lies somewhere in the middle,” she says. “Incidentally, many great quality fragrances possess exceptional longevity and sillage, but I don’t think they necessarily have to in order to be great.”