How Aesop Handsoap and Byredo Cologne Became Luxe Essentials of the #BoyBathroom

The camera pans slowly across a pristine bathroom counter, where products are positioned with museum-like precision. Aesop’s amber bottles are unmistakably ubiquitous, whether for soap, lotion, or mouthwash. Shiny, unsqueezed Marvis toothpaste tubes lie next to unused Marvis toothbrushes, in all their plainness. Byredo and Le Labo are often interchangeable in the fragrance wardrobe, frequently featured side by side. A Diptyque candle frequently cameos, casting shadows over striped Tekla towels. This is the #boybathroom—social media’s latest shrine to masculine curation.

Videos tagged #boybathroom have collectively amassed millions of views across TikTok, with individual posts reaching over one million likes. In each, young men showcase their meticulously organized personal care arsenals. These aren’t random product collections: they’re carefully assembled mood boards that speak a shared aesthetic language.

From Sydney to Stockholm, the same brands appear with clockwork consistency, suggesting something deeper than mere preference—a new form of identity performance in which bathroom counters have become the ultimate status symbol.

The brands that dominate the #boybathroom universe share a remarkably specific DNA, one that speaks less to their individual merits than to their collective ability to signal “aesthetic stoicism,” says psychoanalyst and cultural researcher André Alves of Float in São Paulo.

What connects Aesop, Le Labo, Byredo, Tekla, and Diptyque isn’t a coincidence. It’s a shared design philosophy that has become the visual shorthand for sophisticated masculinity. Each brand employs a strikingly similar aesthetic vocabulary: muted color palettes dominated by whites, blacks, and earth tones; sans-serif typography that suggests clinical precision; and packaging that prioritizes geometric simplicity over ornamental flourish.

These brands have collectively created what amounts to a uniform for aspirational living. Their minimalist bottles and containers photograph beautifully, their price points signal exclusivity without screaming ostentation, and their international origins provide cultural cache. Crucially, they all reject the hyper-masculine visual cues of traditional men’s grooming: rare is the bold font, aggressive color, or overtly butch imagery. (War Paint tinted moisturizers, these are not.) Instead, they offer a more sophisticated form of status signaling: products that whisper rather than shout their luxury credentials.

What’s most notable is their homogenizing effect when assembled together. Alves explains the concept of “homo aestheticus” from French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky: “Contemporary culture demands constant self-curation, but the more the subject tries to aestheticize themselves, the harder it becomes because there’s more to curate.” This pressure manifests in uniformity, just as it has across personal style (you know, how every mid-tier clothing brand feels oddly interchangeable of late).

The result is a flattened individual expression, turned into a collective performance. These brands succeeded not by being different, but by being different in exactly the same way. They create a visual language that allows men to signal their refinement while remaining safely within the bounds of an established aesthetic orthodoxy.

In the #boybathroom universe, true rebellion would be reaching for a bottle of Head & Shoulders. In one jarring moment (seen above), a creator briefly showed TheraBreath mouthwash among his products, a perfectly functional brand I love to endorse, but one that elicited a visceral reaction from me when it appeared in the vanity. That’s because its garish, drugstore aesthetic violated the unspoken rules of this carefully constructed world.

The aesthetic’s rigid parameters become even more apparent in what’s absent. Facial hair maintenance barely registers: an occasional Chanel aftershave, sleek steel safety razor, or Philips Norelco OneBlade, but shaving seems almost antithetical to the clean-faced, optimized aesthetic these spaces promote.

Ultimately, these brands succeed in the #boybathroom ecosystem not despite their similarity, but because of it. It’s the “life well designed” version of “a life well lived” as the ultimate aspiration.

Despite being personal spaces, these bathrooms look remarkably identical, with so much careful copy-pasting. (Other frequent appearances were made by the likes of Ouai, Caudalie, C.O. Bigelow, and Necessaire.) With each viewing, I would think, “Every one of those brands is fantastic, yet the video itself has nothing to say.” Where’s the POV of the TikToker himself?

I contacted five of these top-performing posters for interviews about the #boybathroom. I wanted to know why they chose each of those brands, what their connection was to the products they showcased. What does it mean, what do they mean? All five either failed to respond or chose not to—perhaps the first time I’ve been blanked by a subject. Then again, when a video is worth over a million views, maybe it isn’t worth a single word, hashtags notwithstanding.

Below, a closer look at the sinkledge headliners that speak for themselves.