The Best Men’s Colognes With Cedar, From Burberry to Armani

Guichard’s aforementioned scent, with its triple dose of cedar from North Africa, the Himalayas, and Virginia, is long-lasting and easy to wear. It has a leather accord that gives the woody notes some edge, and a peppery bite that’ll make it feel right at home this fall and winter.

Like its name implies, 40 Knots adds an aquatic dimension to cedar’s signature strength that evokes the fresh, salty sensation of being on the deck of a yacht. Though Xerjoff doesn’t publish a specific list of notes for this bottle, you definitely get a verdant effect that transports you to the Mediterranean.

The late Giorgio Armani was surely proud of this scent, introduced in 2004 and still going strong today. It blends earthy labdanum, vetiver, cedar, and spicy notes for a warming effect that, like the Italian maestro’s clothing, defies trends in favor of something you likely won’t get tired of wearing for years on end.

The newest entry in the L’eau d’Issey Pour Homme family is a true celebration of cedar—its cap is designed to evoke the wood’s grain. It opens with a burst of pink pepper and aquatic notes, before settling into a well-rounded blend of balsam fir and cedar.

Warm and spicy with a creamy finish and all-day longevity, this fragrance celebrates cedar’s softer side. It pairs the masculine scent with pepper, a hint of fresh rose, and a grounding note of sesame and guaiacwood. Of the scents on this list, it’s the one your friends won’t have heard of before.

The best way to describe this alluring scent is that it smells like pencil shavings, in a chic way. There are other ingredients at play (rose, vetiver, musk), but the predominant aroma is pure Virginian cedar. It might just give you favorable memories of grade school.

This is probably the most classically masculine scent on the list, but it’s a true celebration of what cedar can do for a fragrance. It opens with bright green notes of violet leaves and clary sage, then settles down into a warm, amber-y space anchored by a long-lasting cedar oil.

Though the ginger note takes center stage here, it wouldn’t feel as sparkling or as warm without the cedar in the base, which gives this fragrance a depth and richness that’ll get compliments no matter where you go.

Your inner hippie will appreciate the bohemian nature of this scent, redolent with cedar, redwood, pine, incense, and tobacco. But you won’t smell like a burning forest: There’s a little vanilla in the mix to keep things well-rounded.

If trees could drink, they might smell something like this scent. Straight to Heaven evokes the boozy smell of a liquor cellar filled with aged wood barrels, and opens with a sweet rum note. But it dries down to a blend of patchouli and cedar that offers the olfactory equivalent of a cashmere scarf.

This scent, which pairs cedar with the Japanese cypress known as hinoki, adds a forthrightly fresh dimension to its titular woody notes. The duality of peppery green spice and warming wood makes it a great candidate for a scent to wear year-round.

Terre d’Hermès became an instant classic when it was introduced in 2006, because it rejected the aquatic scents that dominated the landscape at the time. Its blend of flint, grapefruit, warm spices, and cedar instead proposed the idea of a man connected firmly to the earth. There are now five flankers, each playing up different elements of the initial formula, but the original is still getting guys compliments nearly 20 years later.

Few fragrance brands spin a yarn quite as effectively as D.S. & Durga, and Mississippi Medicine is a prime example. The scent, redolent of red cedar, is an olfactory homage to the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, regions linked by similarities in their religious beliefs, rituals, symbols, and artifacts that emerged in the medieval Americas around 1200 C.E. Among their commonalities was a cedar tree that represented a portal between the human world, the heavens, and the underworld. If you want to know what that smells like, click below.

Yves Coulesant, one of the founders of Diptyque, spent his childhood in Vietnam. This scent is designed to evoke his memories of how the country’s forests—rich in cypress, cedar, and sandalwood—smelled to his young nose. It’s smooth, minimalist, and the sandalwood shines for the first few hours you wear it. But the cedar gives it structure and comes through in the drydown, alongside a warm hint of smoke.

Dior’s ultra-high-end La Collection Prive gives the house’s master perfumer, Francis Kurkdjian, the room to focus on exclusive ingredients and innovative production methods. In the case of Bois Talisman, that means a triple shot of warming vanilla underpinned by a cedar note that gives the sweet ingredient a masculine structure. It’s an ode to Christian Dior’s longtime practice of hiding a lucky piece of wood in the lining of his own garments, acting as a hidden good-luck charm—hence the name.

In the time before Aventus dominated every rich guy’s cologne shelf, Creed was better known for fragrances that celebrated individual ingredients. Royal Oud puts the spotlight on agarwood, the source of the “oud” note that has become so popular in fragrance over the last several years, but it also relies on cedar, which stands out in both the top and middle notes with a fresh, spicy, crowd-pleasing character.

Amouage’s fragrances are always a little unexpected, always seem to zig where others zag. For Sunshine Man, the house blends white flowers and juniper berries with cedar, vanilla, tonka bean, and a hint of brandy to put you into vacation mode. It doesn’t sound like it works, but it does.