Men are no longer passive about their grooming routines. They’re now actively buying skin care for themselves and gifting it, too.
For brands such as Dove Men+Care and Axe, both part of Unilever and each bringing in over $1.08 billion (€1 billion) in revenue, the business case is clear: Men’s grooming is transitioning from function to lifestyle.
“The cliché that men who care [about skin care] represent a small, select group is gone,” Augusto Garzon, global brand vp for Unilever’s men’s personal care portfolio, told Glossy. “Men are unapologetic about caring for [their skin] now. They’re better informed, more confident and actively choosing products across categories they never engaged with before.”
According to a 2025 study by Barclays Bank, Gen-Z men represent the biggest spenders in the male beauty category, with 42% saying they devote a larger share of their income to grooming, ahead of millennials at 29%. And YouGov data from 2024 shows that, in the U.S., men ages 18-24 were twice as likely to shop at Sephora in 2024 than in 2020. Pinterest’s 2025 trend report cites a 230% surge in searches for male facial treatments. And retailers including Target, Walmart and Walgreens have brought on many men’s skin-care brands over the last three years, including Lumin, Dwayne Johnson’s Papatui and Tone. Finally, market research firm Allied Market Research forecasts that the men’s skin-care segment will reach $16 billion by 2032, growing around 8% annually.
According to PwC’s 2025 Holiday Outlook and Pinterest Predicts 2025, male self-gifting and Gen-Z-led discovery are key drivers of the trend. These trends are among the factors driving the current product development and retail strategies of Dove Men+Care and Axe.
Garzon traces men’s changing attitudes toward skin care to a “huge democratization of information” via social media, especially Instagram and TikTok. “Information [about skin care] might be precise, though sometimes not — but people follow whoever they think can give them the truth. That access [to information] makes people feel more confident that they can make a choice and a purchase.”
For Dove Men+Care, last year’s launch of its Whole Body Deodorant range, with products priced $8–$10, expanded the brand into skin-care-led body care for men. The deodorant leverages patented MicroMoisture technology, said to deposit microscopic moisture droplets to form a lightweight film. Some of the products also contain ceramides, a popular ingredient in women’s skin care.
“Only 1% of your sweat happens in the underarm,” Garzon said. “The main reason men wouldn’t use a product like this before was fear of irritation in certain parts of their body. Dove Men+Care suited perfectly to create this market.”
He added that, when it comes to men’s products with skin-care ingredients, “we’re moving at a slower pace than female adoption, but we’re seeing very high performance in repeat rates.”
“That’s the big point of any innovation,” he added.
The alcohol-free, ingredient-led line is now positioned in major U.S. and European retailers alongside dermo-skin-care brands including CeraVe Men and Bulldog.
To promote the collection, Dove Men+Care leaned into a major driver of men’s adoption: sports athletes. The launch was supported by a campaign featuring former NFL star Marshawn Lynch and his Beastmode brand that challenged stigma around body odor. The partnership drove a 76% lift in top-of-mind awareness and a 27% increase in purchase intent, according to the brand.
Meanwhile, for Axe — or Lynx, as it is known in Europe — its recent challenge has been repositioning itself from a teenage body spray brand to a fragrance-experience brand. Two years ago, it launched the Fine Fragrance Collection with premium scent cues and products retailing for $7-$10. “We’re not a cologne and not just a deodorant,” Garzon said. “We’re a hybrid. Our ambition was to bring a stronger, more aggressive play toward fragrances crafted to be close to fine-fragrance quality, but at a mass price.”
The brand doubled down on cultural relevance with Axe in 2025. A Spring 2025 campaign for a catnip-infused body spray leveraged the insight from cultural studies that about 60% of cat owners will only accept their partner if their cat likes them. “From that truth, we built an activation that connected to a real community and was authentic, but also entertaining,” Garzon said. The campaign included a catnip-scented billboard and influencer content that generated approximately 165,000 organic views across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube and earned two Bronze Cannes Lions.
Axe has made a habit of infusing its marketing with humor. Its Lower Body Spray campaign, launched in 2025, featured cheeky “scratch & sniff” billboards as part of the brand’s fragrance-focused “Power of Sweetness” campaign, which aims to reframe attraction around confidence and playfulness, according to Garzon. The campaign also supported Axe’s $12–$18 holiday gift sets featuring its best-selling scents in limited-edition bundles. The billboard activation, which invited people to literally smell the ad, earned a Gold Lion at Cannes for its spin on fragrance storytelling.
Together, both brands’ products and campaigns show how Unilever’s 2-year-old internal innovation plan — known as SASSY, for “Science, Aesthetics and Sensorials” — is shaping the evolution of its men’s portfolio. The plan ensures that every product delivers on both functional performance and sensorial qualities.
“We continuously think about what’s going to happen in the next three to five years,” Garzon said. “You never revolutionize your core [assortment], you evolve it,” he said, noting the brand’s focus on keeping best-selling lines fresh through formula and design updates. “Then you can create a revolution” via new product tiers or benefits expanding a brand’s range, he said. Dove Men+Care, for instance, builds on its core body-care range with innovations like the Whole Body Deodorant, while Axe’s Fine Fragrance Collection pushed Axe into more premium territory. “You embed the core in culture while elevating the premium side by bringing new benefits.”
He added, “We’re working with really good technology across both brands. We’re now building on the understanding we had of female skin care, for men. The technologies overall are similar, but the combinations [of ingredients] to suit men is what changes.” He added the ambition is to deliver “advanced skin-care benefits across men’s deodorant, skin-cleansing and hair” across both brands.
“Men might not know everything about ingredients,” he said, “but what they like is to read that a product has something. Even if they don’t understand it, they’ll look it up and learn. They want the benefit first, and then the explanation.”
