Axe Gets Kind of Kinky in the Shower

This probably won't end well

You’re getting so serenely sudsy in the shower, steam melting away the tension of another rough day … when the water suddenly cuts out. What do you do?

The answer, of course, is slosh down the hall, dripping Axe body wash on the tacky communal carpet, and ask an elderly neighbor if you can rinse yourself off in her apartment. You bring along your retro cassette boombox—that goes without saying.

Our hero below takes such a trek in the ad below. But there’s a (vaguely NSFW) twist that finds him working up a different kind of lather.

It was all a fiendish plot by the S&M granny. Seems so clear in retrospect.

LOLA MullenLowe and Czar directors Koen Mortier and Joe Vanhoutteghem helped craft the commercial, which just broke in Germany, and rolls out elsewhere in Europe this year.

“The power of a fragrance lies in its ability to disarm, surprise and connect people—even in the most unlikely moments,” says agency ECD Tomás Ostiglia. “This film pushes the edge, but never loses the charm.”

Alas, soapy-dude might lose his towel in the end.

Of the shoot, Ostiglia recalls, “It was a masterclass in performance direction—the kind of painstaking process that requires the patience of a chess grandmaster, or a children’s party clown. The goal? To make it funny before a single word was spoken.”

The bubbly froth “was a specially blended, dense formula designed to last on skin,” he recalls. “We had an art team on standby for emergency soap-suit touch-ups between takes. And no, the actor wasn’t actually naked underneath—we checked.”

“The tape player was real. The song—’Oma, So Lieb’ by Heintje—played on a loop. All. Day. Long. Making ads can be grueling. But we laughed—a lot.”