Sarah Jessica Parker has reimagined her original fragrance for a new generation
Sarah Jessica Parker has come a long way since her early days of playing the hopelessly romantic Carrie Bradshaw.
The Ohio native has won Emmys and Golden Globes, and has pioneered a successful shoe and accessory brand letting the fans that have been watching her for years on their television screens bring home a little bit of her essence. Parker took that to the next level in 2005, when she debuted her first fragrance, Lovely.
The iconic perfume has been around now for over 10 years, and 2018 brought a fresh new take on the beloved scent to the SJP Beauty family. We sat down with the "Sex and the City" actress at her Manhattan pop-up store to chat about her latest beauty venture, Born Lovely, the second iteration of her original fragrance. Read the full conversation below:
AOL: What made you want to create a contemporary, more youthful update to Lovely?
SJP: I think it's fairly typical in the fragrance business to have these other initiatives, flankers and things, and we'd been trying to sort out what Lovely would give birth to for kind of a while and I think the timing just felt right. I think also because there was so specifically a new generation now -- it's so defined now and it feels so different -- it felt more purposeful this time versus just a mercenary effort, so thus Born Lovely.
How does Born Lovely differ from your original fragrance?
The packaging isn’t radically different, it has some added kind of points on it, but it's so clearly a baby daughter. I think the difference is just the note. Lovely has a very specific kind of signature, kind of fragrant smell -- that was intentional. I feel like [Born Lovely] is a fragrance that just simply feels younger. And that's a completely subjective thing, as is your experience with fragrance and how you respond to it, but for me it's just the way the notes are balanced. It just feels younger.
What inspired you to have the Born Lovely campaign shot in an NYC studio with a bit of a ballet vibe?
The original campaign -- we shot it in a studio with a ballet bar and Mr. de la Renta made that dress and it wasn’t without acknowledgment to ballet. You know a ballet costume, a tutu, but not that literal, and we wanted some familiar imagery that would connect it... What is the connective tissue between these two and how do we share that and how do we convey that? And from the beginning it was really important to me that and to all of us -- we wanted faces that reflect a community that aren’t one idea and also the idea of Born Lovely and what it means and the possibilities and all the ways that we can express it.
Photo credit: SJP Beauty
And it was really important to me from the beginning that the campaign have diversity, not because it was politically correct, but years and years ago we started talking about this fragrance, and that was from the first conversations always something that I wanted to do. It's just what I felt was inspiring about who inspired this fragrance; it's the people I see walking down the street, the young women that I stand next to on the subway. So we are very fortune to have found such smart and beautiful young women to be part of it. It was a blessing for us.
Shop more of SJP's signature fragrances below:
