If you grew up in the US in the ’90s and ’00s, it’s likely that your memories are haunted by one particular scent: Abercrombie & Fitch’s Fierce. Spilling throughout the corridors of every mall, permeating school locker rooms, wafting through house parties and college fraternities, the scent was everywhere after it was released in 2002 — an impressive feat for a brand’s first fragrance. In the 20 years since its launch, Fierce became not only a commercial success but also an emotional one, holding a singular place in the olfactory time capsule of millennials everywhere.

Originally meant to be a men’s fragrance, Fierce was an ancillary product for a clothing store catering mostly to preppy teens. That its launch in 2002 coincided with the period when Abercrombie & Fitch became one of the coolest and most coveted brands for young people only made the scent that much more appealing — and that much more ubiquitous. Although Fierce is now remembered as coming in hot — with all the subtlety of a marching band — the juice itself was an underdog in the fragrance industry, the kind of small project most big perfumers wouldn’t touch due to its assumed puny earning potential. Even its creators never anticipated that it would dominate the first decade of this century. 

In fact, Carlos Benaim, one of the perfumers responsible for creating Fierce and a master perfumer at International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), has a hard time recalling its precise origins. “What I do remember is that it was about capturing the spirit of masculinity and youth in a bottle,” he tells Tudum, recollecting that he plucked one of his work-in-progress formulas as a starting point for Fierce. “I had been playing with a very elegant, masculine, impactful accord, which used some of IFF’s iconic woody and amber-y molecules such as Grisalva, Cashmeran and ISO E Super, together with a beautiful quality of sage oil.” An accord is a combination of singular scent notes that create a unique fragrance, similar to musical notes being played together. Benaim had spent more than two years attempting to perfect this one before passing the torch to two other perfumers at IFF, Christophe Laudamiel and Bruno Jovanovic, to finish the job for Abercrombie & Fitch. Laudamiel had first come across the brand at a shopping mall in Boston and was aware of its preppy reputation. He said that even though A&F had wanted Fierce to be “something cool,” he knew it had to be a little bit conservative and “not revolutionary” — that is, it had to be wearable. 

Laudamiel’s vision was a simplification of a classically masculine fragrance into something that would appeal to the youths of the 2000s. He streamlined the accord he’d gotten from Benaim, removing the amber-y, resinous notes that evoked the classic colognes of the ’70s and ’80s. He also got rid of any powdery, floral, sweet notes — anything that might suggest a barbershop. With that taken care of, the team ended up with a handful of fragrance iterations that Laudamiel internally referred to as the “Indecent series,” which were then sent to the client and alphabetically labeled through G. 

Months went by before IFF heard back from A&F about the Indecent series. The news was good, but came with an unexpected twist: Their favorite sample had been G. Laudamiel remembers his surprise: “I said, ‘But guys, G is the base. Did you send them the base?’” A scent’s base is often merely the starting point for a finished fragrance, but somehow the revised base that Laudamiel had created was included in the offerings, and it was the one that made the cut. Wanting to give it a bit more complexity, Laudamiel added pino acetaldehyde — fresh, like an ocean breeze — as the finishing touch that brought Fierce to market. That final note rests on top of clary sage, cucumber, a touch of lemon, lavandin grosso, moss, tonka, molecular sandalwood, white musk and Cashmeran in the finished formula. (For the fragrance-heads out there, Laudamiel contests the Fragrantica analysis of Fierce.) 

From that basic beginning, Fierce proceeded to take over the nation. “I knew that ‘essence of masculinity’ would be liked, for what it was,” Benaim says. “However, I was surprised by the extent of its success. You could smell Fierce in the streets two blocks away from the A&F store. You could smell it on young men in the US, and people in Europe were asking their friends traveling in the US to bring it back to them…. You can’t separate the brand’s equity from the fragrance. The scent really gave Abercrombie & Fitch a recognizable, memorable identity."

Fierce’s proliferation did a brilliant job of searing the brand into the consciousness of anyone who got a whiff — and pretty much everyone who stepped into a mall got one. In fact, A&F worked fervently to make sure that people were inundated with the fragrance, including those who worked in the stores and were put on “spraying duty.” Alex, an employee at the Westfield Topanga store between 2007 to 2014, remembers the task being “insanely specific.” Instructions were as granular as doing “three-to-five spritzes on each of the mannequins [and] one-to-two spritzes around the room” every hour. As to whether or not this was Fierce overkill, Alex tells Tudum, “Honestly, you just become so immune to the smell if you worked there long enough.”  

Julie, an employee at the South Street Seaport store in the early 2000s, vividly remembers the scent. “We were required to spray the shit out of all the mannequins and the ‘atmosphere’ throughout our shifts,” she says. “Especially when greeting or putting the folded clothes back out on the floor. We also had to wear [it].”

Eventually, A&F flagship stores installed automatic scent spritzers that were timed to unleash Fierce on a schedule. It was an effective process that propelled the scent much further than the store’s famously shuttered windows. But it wasn’t perfect. “The room spritzers were expensive and also faulty,” Alex remembers. “One at my store just continually spritzed.” Laudamiel was eventually tasked to modify Fierce “for the air” in an effort to make its presence slightly more bearable for the staff and, more importantly, the parents who were forced to loiter in the store while their adolescent kids spent their money. “The moss [in the air] was too suffocating... too heavy,” Laudamiel says. People had stopped finding it merely alluring and were beginning to consider it oppressive.

It wasn’t just Fierce that was having branding problems. As documented in White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, the brand itself was faltering not only due to the post-Y2K era of e-commerce and direct-to-consumer hype brands taking over from mall culture, but also because of allegations of discrimination and exclusivity. A&F’s strategy of elitism was out of fashion, and as the brand faced an overhaul, so did the iconic fragrance.

When Abercrombie & Fitch’s new CEO Fran Horowitz came onboard in 2017, she relieved the brand from Fierce’s chokehold, exploring other olfactory options to bring A&F into its new reality. But while the brand experimented with a few less intense and more gender-neutral scents (I remember really liking the Ellwood White Bergamot one), none of them had the same grip on shoppers as Fierce did. And so it returned. Laudamiel tells Tudum he visited an Abercrombie & Fitch store just a few months ago and was greeted by the scent of his creation once more at the entrance. 

Even though Fierce has persisted, its relevance has been diluted by a market flooded with scent options that define masculinity a bit more fluidly. Like all icons, though, Fierce’s power resides in its ability to be successfully recontextualized. The updated Fierce now delivers its signature masculine musk in an updated, unassuming package. Instead of a close-up photo of a man’s torso, the new packaging is adorned with nothing but an elegantly minimal typeface displaying its name. No matter the branding, the scent still smells of popped collars, MTV’s Spring Break, fake tans, Dawson’s Creek and The O.C. — tentpoles of millennials’ adolescence.

“I believe Fierce really captured the spirit of a generation,” Benaim says. “I think it was a combination of the sex appeal of the fragrance and the success of the fashion brand, which every single young male in America wanted to be a part of.” The new Fierce has a new generation’s spirit to capture, and it’s doing so by approaching it through multiple dimensions, with an entourage of companion scents, designed to suit different vibes (if, that is, the vibes are Night, Confidence, Blue, Reserve, Gold and Oud Amour). As Business Insider reported in 2019, when A&F rereleased the scent, the intention behind the fragrance became to explore “the modern notion of what it means to be fierce through a sensitive, diverse and inclusive lens.” Whether Fierce can pull off that 180 relies on the buying power of a sensitive, diverse generation of young people, many of whom missed out completely on the Fierce influence of the early aughts. 

Scents themselves are just a combination of neutral chemical compounds, of course. But they gain meaning through the context of people’s memories and attendant emotional resonance. For the millennials who couldn’t escape Abercrombie & Fitch’s dominance, Fierce will probably always be a nostalgic cornerstone, a reminder of the potency of their youth — for better or for worse.