Charlotte Tilbury is a woman’s woman on all accounts. On top of helping women to look their absolute best, she’s always happy to share her secrets, as she believes that when a woman looks her best, she’ll also feel more confident. “Give a woman the right makeup, and she can conquer the world,” she says. You’ll also find the saying printed on the gorgeous makeup bags that accompany her collection. And now she’s sharing another secret.
Like many of Tilbury’s homemade concoctions (her famous Magic Cream is a prime example), she has been layering a blend of essential oils as her signature fragrance for 30 years. Being as it was so unique, Tilbury was complemented so much that she finally decided to bottle it up for the rest of us. Improved and perfected, of course, not only through perfumery, but with the help of neuroscientists too.
Tilbury’s first signature fragrance, Scent of a Dream (of which Kate Moss is the face), is not just a fragrance. Which is more or less what the bombshell has done with the majority of her products; it’s never just a lipstick/foundation/blush. Tilbury’s fascination with perfume’s ability to affect the brain’s memory centres, to attract, and to even change the atmosphere and mood of those who experience it meant she had a lot of plans for the product. So she enlisted the Nose, François Robert, along with Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Richard Axel and Dr. Linda Buck to ensure the perfume would have just the right “magic” behind its chemistry.
Adding new elements to her original essential oil blend, the final result is said (with the science to back it up), to inspire confidence in its wearer, with top notes of peach, saffron, mandarin, black pepper, and lemon; to spark feelings of love and passion with middle notes of jasmine, frankincense, tuberose, patchouli, and more; and to stimulate desire—in its wearer, and in those near them—with the addition of amber, musks, hedione, ambroxan, and Iso E Super. The chemistry of the latter group are said to amplify the pheromones of its wearer, helping to truly personalize the scent. “It will become yours,” Tilbury explains. “There are certain molecules, especially, that I put in this fragrance, that really amplify [the essence of the wearer],” she says, “other perfumes can overpower that.”
And as the girl who didn’t always want to share all of the secrets it took her a lifetime to create and perfect, the fact that Scent of a Dream “so genuinely smells a bit different on everyone,” she says, made her happy to share this secret and its confidence-boosting abilities, with everyone.
The scent will be available exclusively on charlottetilbury.com as of August 15th, and at Holt Renfrew and Nordstrom from September 1st.