Ewan McGregor, unshaven, artfully rugged, dressed in anti-fashion thermals and ethnic scarf, finds himself on “an incredible journey . . . the scent of adventure in the air”. He’s all alone, contemplating a stick insect, astride a photogenic Triumph Bonneville, in among deserted mountains and dry river beds, riding through dusty steppe.

The landscape is breathtaking but, this being a men’s aftershave advertisement, the greatest thing Ewan discovers during his journey is, of course, himself. “I saw something magnificent,” he decides as the Davidoff Adventure ad reaches its Bertolucci-esque climax. “I saw my life in a whole new light.” Ooh.

This lushly art-directed, fragrant landscape is no country for mouldy men. It’s the setting for new levels of daffy solipsism in the marketing of men’s grooming products — glossy escapism that is the antidote to all those pouty CK One years of androgynous, fey imagery.

At the cheap and cheerful end of the marketplace, Lynx is selling its underarm Toilet Duck as deodorising bird-puller-in-a-can with endearing, laddish funnies and the route-one strapline: “Spray More. Get More.” But at the top end, things are bafflingly pretentious, smug and shamelessly homoerotic.

In the new television ad for Dolce & Gabbana’s The One fragrance, for instance, Matthew McConaughey walks through the backstreets of Rome. He’s being pursued, La Dolce Vita-style, by a pack of paparazzi with itchy shutter fingers. Flashbulbs are popping all over the shop, but Mac — in suit and shades — keeps his cool. Finally, he makes his escape from the mob. Back in his apartment, he shuts the door, strips down to his irrefutably impressive bare rack (think bench-pressed Sunday roast smeared with baby oil) and, wearing the satisfied grin of someone who knows he is finally safe to relax, throws himself decoratively onto a couch. But hey, guess what? More flashbulbs start popping. Matt smiles again, this time as if he’s recently scored. He seems to have pulled . . . himself.

What’s all that about? Has he let the papa-nazis into his pad, or has an unseen lover taken over as in-house snapper? More to the point, as a vaguely metrosexual man who might just be at the far end of the D&G demographic, what the hell am I supposed to make of all this? While the Texan movie star seems a likeable sort, the sight of him rippled and semi-naked (aside from making me feel old and genetically inadequate) does very little for me, while the notion that the dude is so terminally starry and narcissistic that he has to have someone pointing a camera at him even when he’s chillaxing at home does nothing to make me want to buy the fragrance he is advertising.

Then again, I may have got it all wrong. Maybe this dishy, straight man is advertising a product aimed mainly at gay men.

Or maybe the ad is aimed at women who will appreciate McConaughey’s Olympic bod and go on to buy the new D&G pong for the men in their lives. Confusingly, he has filmed another version of the ad, in which he keeps his top on, for his American fans. Surely the man who spends most of his life shirtless can’t have gone shy?

It’s complicated being an adequately moisturised and fresh-smelling man these days.

When we men decide to marinade ourselves in unguents and scent, we are expected to take the art director’s chair, decode confusing messages, take an olfactory world tour — Sicilian bergamot, British leather, amber from the North Sea, Australian sandalwood, Argentinian maté — or even call our sexuality into question. We have to take sides. Am I a rugged, outdoorsy Ewan sort or a slick, urban type like Matthew?

But here’s the thing: heterosexual men are not really cool with any of this stuff. Yes, the UK men’s market is now worth up to £800m a year, but that’s still only about £270 a year for each of the country’s 30m blokes, with most of the products purchased being low-end, probably by wives and girlfriends doing the weekly shop. And forget about the gay market. “If you do the numbers, aiming any product exclusively at the gays just wouldn’t turn a big enough profit,” says marketing expert Peter York.

Grooming, overzealous moisturising, crop-dusting with expensive smells — these are the terminally uncool habits of self-obsessed, mirror-seeking ponces. We really don’t trust men who take more than two products into the bathroom, or who smell like a Rockefeller’s gap year. Russian coriander, Cuban mahogany, lush Hawaiian accords, South African mandarin are all a bit suspect.

More crucially, what the fragrance behemoths don’t understand is that we men don’t really like looking at other men. Check out the covers of men’s magazines and you will notice that more often than not they feature beautiful women. This isn’t just because men are drooling, sex-obsessed skirt-chasers, but more because the alternative — male celebrities — has a dangerously polarising effect on us. Sometimes we want to be like them. Most of the time, we want to punch them.

There are only a few men whose style we admire, whom we would actually want to hang with, shoot the breeze with and smell like. Ewan McGregor? During his pre-Obi-Wan Kenobi years, maybe. Matthew McConaughey? Too pleased with himself. Too fit. Too damned handsome.

Instead, like football, men’s vanity tends to be a results-based game. Will this elixir make me look younger, less hungover, less pasty? Will it eradicate my underarm odour? Will it make me more attractive to women? If we see a product working for a civilian loser type, all the better. Embarrassed at our own raging vanity, as in all other precarious situations, we try to make a joke out of it. And that’s where Lynx gets it so right.

Remember the Lynx Pulse ad a couple of years ago, where a geeky guy gets up in a coffee bar and starts doing a dance routine with a couple of girls? The dancing is slightly naff, the guy a bit too keen, the girls a bit brassy, the tune 100% Magaluf. But the ad is somehow a sweetly subtle and beautiful thing. It makes you smile and really want to be that guy.

Then there’s the famous Lynx Billions ad: a guy with the beginnings of love handles and a beer belly is on a beach dousing himself with two cans of cheap body spray. Hundreds of rabid girls in bikinis come marauding over the rocks to get to their sweet-smelling man. The ad for Lynx Dark Temptation has a Farrelly Brothers-ish vibe: a man made of chocolate gets his bottom bitten by a girl on a bus who just can’t resist him.

“You can’t take yourself too seriously when you are £3.99 in Boots,” says Rosie Arnold, Bartle

Bogle Hegarty’s creative director and the woman responsible for the Lynx campaigns. “We try to dial up the best of a man’s wit and sense of humour.” The Lynx ads are silly but there’s a grain of truth in each one. “We are very careful with casting,” says Arnold. “Men don’t want to see anyone too good-looking or too cocksure advertising their brand. Ideally, you recognise the man as one of your own. The ads are clever but the message is simple: you are more likely to get female attention if you smell nice.”