Smells Like Gen Z: Diesel Launches Women’s Fragrance

Diesel’s creative director, Glenn Martens, is obsessed with objects. His FW26 show featured 50,000 pieces of memorabilia from the brand’s shows, parties, window displays, events, and offices. And his show invites are often crafted using Murano glass from the brand’s native Veneto region, fashioned into butt plugs or bananas. Now, the brand is adding another special object to the mix — a fragrance bottle designed to look like a pierced-open orchid for its new women’s scent, Only Desire, launching this month globally online and in Diesel stores.

“Diesel is a $1 billion — more or less — business in fashion. This means that the potential for fragrance is high and we want to capture it,” Sandrine Groslier, global president of luxe fragrances brands at L’Oréal Group, tells Vogue Business exclusively. “We hope that this fragrance will have a broad appeal and it will speak to many women.”

At L’Oréal Group, fragrance continues to boom. In its Q1 fiscal 2026 results, the company’s Luxe arm, made up of luxury skincare, makeup, and fragrance brands, posted 5.6% growth on a like-for-like basis. The group noted that “fragrances remained the standout growth engine.”

Dove Cameron for Diesel’s Only Desire fragrance. Photo: Courtesy of Diesel

And there’s still growth potential. According to Euromonitor, the fragrance category is on track to grow 8.1% to $94 billion by 2027 despite fatigue or oversaturation.

It has been 15 years since Diesel launched a mass women’s fragrance with Loverdose in 2011, which went on to have three different iterations without sustaining its buzz thereafter. But with a helping hand from its licensee, L’Oréal Group, the brand wants to tap the potential of the growing category. The brand’s former women’s fragrances, such as Loverdose, D, and Fuel For Life, are still stocked on Diesel’s website, but across the wider business, they have lost momentum.

Since 1978, when Rosso founded Diesel, the brand ethos has been to appeal to a broader consumer with an accessible price point. In the ’90s and 2000s, the brand entered the premium market with its denim offering, but by the 2010s, Diesel had lost its luster, and women’s fragrances were waning.

Since Martens took the reins at Diesel in 2020, the focus has been on what he calls “alternative luxury”, with a strong premium positioning in the market and price points that don’t exceed £3,000. Only Desire will be priced at €75 for a 30ml bottle — strategically set to broaden appeal as the brand reinvigorates its fragrance business. “What we see today is that fragrances below €100 are really the ones growing the fastest,” says Groslier.

Martens’ leadership has ushered in a new demographic for Diesel. Before the designer joined, the brand’s consumer base was primarily millennial men, and women accounted for just 20% of revenue. Martens has boosted Diesel’s Gen Z user base to 36% via his edgy, sexy take on denim and accessories. The designer has been consistently praised in parent company OTB’s fiscal earnings — in 2025, group sales fell 5%, but Diesel was noted as “the most profitable it’s been in a decade.” In 2023, revenues grew 13%, the first year since Martens’s debut Diesel show, and the label maintained growth in 2024 at 3.2%.

Even for a premium brand such as Diesel with its democratic pricing, an entry-level beauty product for price-sensitive consumers is a key opportunity. “Beauty is lucrative, and the margins are great — generally better than fashion. So it makes sense that in a sort of murky economic time, brands would push beauty to try to help their overall business,” says Allison Collins, co-founder and managing director of advisory firm The Consumer Collective. “For a lot of luxury brands, beauty serves as the entry point – a consumer who can afford beauty may not be able to afford fashion, but it still welcomes them into a layer of the brand’s world.”

Diesel has an established history in men’s fragrance, with popular scents such as Only The Brave and Bad, launched in 2009 and 2016, respectively. According to Circana’s 2025 report, Diesel’s fragrance business ranked in 12th place for men’s lifestyle brands. Only Desire represents a strategic pivot for the brand. “Our ambition is to significantly rebalance our business mix to make the feminine segment a core pillar of our growth. We are aiming for a significant shift in our brand footprint, with the objective of seeing our feminine fragrances reach a weight comparable to our masculine icons in the upcoming years,” Groslier says, adding that the brand’s fragrance arm is anticipating double-digit growth.

In the digital age, it’s crucial for a brand to maintain a consistent message across its divisions, and Groslier is an expert at this. At L’Oréal Group, Groslier also oversees Maison Margiela, where Martens is creative director, and in April, the brand launched a haute couture fragrance to reflect the haute couture business. At Diesel, she’s taking inspiration from the same recipe — to unite the brand’s fashion and beauty business — but for a different demographic. Diesel’s fashion business is growing globally, with 70% of new consumers being women and 50% Gen Z, the majority under 25.

Diesel’s Only Desire fragrance. Photo: Courtesy of Diesel

Only Desire, with its erotic fragrance bottle and hot pink color palette, plays into the coquettish narrative set out by Martens at Diesel, who has been at the brand since 2020. As Luke Leitch reported on Diesel’s FW26 show, the designer described his last collection as: “Waking up and maybe having no clear idea of where you are. You have to get dressed and run off in the morning from that scenario, that kinky night. Everything is messed up: you obviously don’t have time to look at yourself in the mirror. But when you’re on the street, you look as hot as fuck because you own it.”

Today’s Diesel customer is rebelling against the norm and the political climate, one where conservatism is on the rise, says Groslier, hence why the subject of female pleasure is central to the fragrance. “Female pleasure has always been stigmatized. The orchid is one of the most precious flowers in the world, and it’s a symbol of resilience for women. It’s not easy to be a woman or to express who you are and what you crave and desire — this flower encapsulates that vision. Women are really the ones moving the needle for Diesel, and that’s why we wanted to go there with such a subject matter that’s an unapologetic vision of femininity and speaks to taboos,” she says. The concept of Only Desire also took inspiration from the 2019 retrospective book on Diesel 5D: Diesel, Dream, Disruption, Deviation, Denim, with the team using the words dream, disruption, and deviation as a North Star.

L’Oréal Group collaborated closely with Martens and Renzo Rosso, the founder of Diesel and its parent company, OTB Group, on the fragrance’s name and on choosing former Disney star Dove Cameron as the fragrance’s global ambassador. The actor and singer has 46.7 million Instagram followers, and combines nostalgia with a modern, progressive point of view. “We wanted someone who can represent Gen Z, but we didn’t want someone who’s just appeared on the scene,” says Groslier, describing the Gen Z Diesel female consumer as a disciple of new fashion and music, who is also engaged in social causes like feminism and climate responsibility. In 2021, Cameron came out as queer and has been vocal about her opposition to anti-LGBTQ+ bills that are being passed through state legislations in the US.

Diesel’s biggest challenge with Only Desire is cutting through the noise in an overcrowded mass fragrance market and appealing to a young demographic that’s already spoiled for choice. The brand is up against mass-market fragrances like Armani’s Power of You and Calvin Klein’s Euphoria Elixir. But Groslier has big plans in gaining market share, especially in China and Japan, where Diesel’s fashion business is lucrative. The brand will be assigning the two markets in Asia their own special ambassador who speaks to the local audience in the coming months.

Diesel also has its eyes set on the UK, France, Germany, and Italy, the brand’s native country. “We want to enter the top 20 for fragrances in France and the UK,” says Groslier. The US is another key market, with proven growth potential for iconic, well-established fashion labels to perform well in the fragrance category.

“For big players, I would expect them to do well in the US. When you think of a brand like Dior, Chanel or Loewe — it already means something to a lot of US consumers. As long as a brand dedicates resources to marketing, store design and connecting to their consumer, they’ll do well. Historically, it is harder for brands that don’t have tons of resources and financial backing to do well in the US market because it’s so large,” says Collins.

Groslier says that the US is a priority market because Diesel has never had a strong presence in the country. “Right now, this market is the number one in the world for fragrances and we need to succeed in it by entering its top rankings; it’s also a strategic market for fashion,” she adds. In September, Diesel will stage a second phase of launch for Only Desire in the US through events, talks and pop-ups that will acquaint the US consumer with the brand’s fragrance business. “We want to make people understand the concept of women’s desire and at the pop-up, we will have some boxes, where visitors can express what desire means to them,” says Groslier, sharing that they’re still in early stages of planning.