“We have an orchard in our backyard that has these beautiful orange trees that flower in the spring,” founder of Naked Beauty Podcast Brooke DeVard tells ESSENCE from her home in Los Angeles. “I would sit outside underneath the orange trees, smelling the orange blossoms, drinking matcha tea and just thinking, ‘wow, this is such a different life than I was living even a year ago,’” when she moved away from the rushed streets of Manhattan. Since then, DeVard has been bottling up the scent of her new environment; leading up to the launch of her first Naked Beauty fragrance today.
Her initial inspiration wasn’t just the notes, “but a feeling,” the podcaster— who is known for interviewing the likes of Ms. Tina Knowles, Alicia Keys, and hairstylist Jawara Wauchope— says. “My first question was, ‘how do I want people to feel when they wear this fragrance?’” With help from fragrance house Modern Magic, DeVard set out to bottle up her new chapter––and the stress release––she felt after her move. “I knew I wanted to create a fragrance that was based on this kind of slower pace of life,” she says, honing in on orange blossom and green tea notes.
With the market saturated with “sexy, date night fragrances” developing an ideal scent you can wear everyday is rare. “I wanted something that felt still bright but down-to-earth, something that was grounded and that’s why it has kind of those woody notes,” she says, before mentioning notes like neroli. Leaning into a unisex scent for all of her listeners to wear, she developed an aroma that is neither too floral nor gourmand.
“I have been making every single person I come across in the past year smell this fragrance,” she says. From friends and family on trips to Tuscany and Turkey, to strangers she meets in passing, fragrance is subjective and feedback was the nose behind the latest Naked Beauty product. To add to her intimate approach, an ingredient called Iso E Super (known from the famous fragrance Escentric Molecules) is a molecule used to adapt to individual body chemistry. This means, with every person who tested her perfume, the bright, woody aroma smells faintly different.
“It took 17 iterations to get to the final fragrance that I have here,” DeVard says. “The very last thing we added was this green tea note that wasn’t in the initial versions I made.” Then, with a vote from her podcast listeners, she encapsulated the finished fragrance in a golden hour, sunset-inspired bottle. “I think for me, I feel really beautiful at sunset during that golden hour,” she says, encapsulating all of the feelings in her new chapter as a scent. “This is it. This is my perfect ideal fragrance.”
