Fragrance house

Boy Smells

Founded in Los Angeles in 2016 by Matthew Herman and David Kien, Boy Smells began as a candle business made by hand from the founders’ home. Drawing on their fashion backgrounds, the founders shaped the brand’s design and scent direction around a deliberate challenge to conventional gender categories, combining ideas traditionally labeled masculine and feminine under the term “genderful.” Its pink packaging and provocative name were intended to question assumptions linking scent, gender, and identity. At the end of 2019, Boy Smells prioritized direct-to-consumer sales and centered its brand platform and campaigns on LGBTQIA identity and equity. In March 2021, it extended from home fragrance into personal fragrance with Cologne de Parfum, its first fine-fragrance collection. Ownership changed in early 2024, when an undisclosed group of gay investors took over the business in a distressed sale. In April 2025, Boy Smells introduced a major rebrand with refreshed visuals and reformulated perfumes and candles. Kush, whose original candle launched in 2016, remains a notable fragrance family, with variants later translated into perfumes.