The name for makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury’s first-ever fragrance came to her in a dream. But not her own.
She was wearing the sultry concoction at a party when a man admitted he had a dream about a woman whose perfume he could smell across the room. When he got a whiff of Tilbury, the feelings came rushing back—it was the smell from his slumber.
The moment turned on a lightbulb for Tilbury, a celebrity makeup artist who counts the likes of Miranda Kerr and Nicole Kidman among her friends. Scent of A Dream encompassed not only this man’s sleep-vision, but also Tilbury’s years-long desire to harness and bottle the emotional power of scent. “It can really alter your state of mind,” she says, seated inside the Manhattan townhouse transformed into a glamorous Tilbury World for a secretive preview of the product, which is now available. Having long mixed and worn her own “secret scent”, Tilbury is no stranger to experimentation with smells, and is obsessively intrigued with how they can make not only the wearer, but also those around her, “feel alive”. Sitting behind a tray of apothecary bottles filled with the ingredients in Scent of A Dream, Tilbury speaks with an energy and rapidity usually reserved for giggling schoolgirls. And in a sense she is one, because her excitement for this long-awaited launch has her gushing—but instead of incessant squeals, Tilbury emits a deep, clear laugh. And unlike teens, you could listen to Tilbury talk all day. She has a bewitching quality that envelops the room, an unbridled poise paired with that token British sass.
Scent of A Dream, which was crafted by fourth-generation French nose Francois Robert—who has created scents for Hermès and Lanvin—is comprised of three aromatic layers: the joy notes (lemon and peach for positivity), the fleurotic notes (tuberose, jasmine, and violet for love and light), and the psycho active notes (fire tree and ambroxan for power and sex). The holy trinity comes together in a complex but approachable fragrance—one that morphs to the wearer and develops on the skin over time. “It is absolutely a fragrance for you,” Robert, seated next to Tilbury, says. He emphasizes the “you”, meaning each individual person; it is a fragrant tool used not to mask one’s own scent, but actually to amplify it.
Tilbury wanted a smell that captured happiness, sexuality, peace, and power—something that would positively affect those who came into contact with it. She strongly believes in the psychology of scent, and even worked with neuroscientists to develop the product. Scent of A Dream, then, is meant to intoxicate and invigorate—to stimulate love, desire, confidence. It’s less designed to capture those fleeting moments and more focused on stimulating new ones.
“It has been such an emotional journey for me,” she says later, her orange bangs falling into her perfectly lined eyes. And then, with a kiss on each cheek, she moves about the room. But her scent is everywhere.
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