Reinventing the Rose: The Scents Seducing a New Generation

According to legend, Venus, the Roman goddess of love, created red roses. Distracted by the death of her lover, Adonis, she pricked herself and turned a bush of white roses red. Though merely mortal, Cleopatra was said to scatter petals around her room to enchant her lover, Marc Antony. Throughout history, roses have been a powerful motif in love stories—from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to reality TV’s The Bachelor—symbolizing love, beauty, and devotion. In the world of perfume, roses evoke all of these emotions and more.

“It’s one of the three most important natural materials for perfume,” says David Moltz, perfumer and co-founder of D.S. & Durga. The rose’s significance dates back to 10th-century Persia, now Iran, where rose oil became central to beauty, cooking, and religious rituals. By the Renaissance, rose oil had traveled west, eventually becoming popular in Europe and among American women during the Victorian era. Since it takes 60,000 roses to make just one ounce of rose absolute (the main ingredient in rose perfumes), it’s no wonder the flower feels so special. “Roses have always had a connotation of value, and people have linked that with the value and the beauty of love or human connection,” says fragrance historian Jessica Murphy. With more than 30,000 varieties of the flower, the scents that can be extracted from a rose are nearly infinite. “Rose is as versatile as it is distinctive,” says Aerin Lauder, founder and creative director of beauty brand Aerin, who just released her new book Living with Flowers. This fluidity is evident in how rose notes are used across a range of fragrances. For instance, in Guerlain Nahema, a bold, sweet scent launched in 1979, rose takes center stage alongside peach, bergamot, and aldehydes. More often, though, rose melds into the background, as it does in Chanel No.5, a powdery classic which leads with a sparkling, almost soapy aldehyde note. But rose scents weren’t always so varied.

Before the introduction of synthetic ingredients at the turn of the 20th century, all perfume came from natural ingredients. The simple fragrances of the 1860s and 1870s focused on a single flower, often rose, Murphy says. By the 1930s and 40s, the introduction of ingredients like aldehydes made perfumes more modern and complex, featuring amber and musk. The generation coming of age then was the first to associate rose scents with their grandmothers, Victorian women who grew, displayed, and wore roses. But the stereotype persisted even as fragrance trends shifted. Though they remain associated with grandmothers today, six generations have passed since the one-note rose perfumes of the late 19th century. “Seeing rose as older is really anachronistic,” Murphy says. “A lot of grandmothers right now, demographically speaking, are probably wearing vanilla perfumes, or Dior J’adore, or Thierry Mugler Alien, which were not rose-oriented.”

In the mid-2010s, a wave of niche fragrance brands began redefining the rose scent, transforming it from a traditional symbol of femininity into a more complex expression of identity. Le Labo Rose 31, a woody, unisex scent released in 2006, was designed to shift “a symbol of voluptuousness and unqualified femininity into an assertively virile fragrance,” according to the brand. Byredo’s Rose of No Man’s Land was inspired by a nickname given to World War I nurses. Luxury brands followed suit. Hermès Ikebana and the beloved Frederic Malle Portrait of a Lady are both rose scents that featured sleeker visuals and more modern marketing. “That more minimalist packaging and that all-gender positioning on the counter encouraged more people to feel comfortable reaching for a perfume that had rose in the notes,” Murphy says.

The concept of genderless rose scents challenges a thousand-year legacy as a symbol of femininity, Murphy explains, pointing to its associations with figures like Venus.“It’s useless for a company to tell the consumer ‘this is for men; this is for women,’” says Moltz, the nose behind Rose Atlantic, D.S. & Durga’s light, beachy, cult favorite. “For instance, Rose Atlantic would be more traditionally feminine, but I think it’s great on men as well,” says Moltz, likening it to the scent of a single flower on a lapel. Autumne West, Nordstrom’s national beauty director, agrees. “Any scent is unisex if you want it to be.”

As marketing became more androgynous, the sex appeal grew. In 2019, Régime des Fleurs launched Little Flower in collaboration with Chloë Sevigny. The ads offer a more abstract and erotic take on the beautiful-woman-holding-flowers trope. Against a black backdrop, Sevigny poses, nearly nude, save for a few strategically placed roses, hands cupped around a splayed-open grapefruit. “Chloe Sevigny has always had that New York It girl identity. And the ads are…edgier. They’re a little sexier than I think people might have expected,” Murphy says. “But that’s a niche, independent brand that can do what they want without focus groups.” It will take time for the trend to reach bigger brands, but we’re starting to see the ripple effects, with legacy perfume houses turning out their own modern takes.

In January, Tom Ford launched Rose Exposed, a bold and spicy unisex scent that offsets rose notes with white pepper and leather accord. That same month, Jo Malone introduced Taif Rose Cologne Intense, which leads with a deep, dark coffee note before revealing the full bloom of a soft damask rose. Following the release of an 11-piece rose collection late last year, Lancôme debuted Power Eau De Parfum Intense, a pomarose-scented addition to the Idôle collection. “We’ve been seeing a lot of customer interest in gourmands and florals. Scents that have notes of vanilla, lavender, jasmine, and rose,” says West.

Though the marketing of Power Idôle draws on tradition, with floral imagery and a pretty pink bottle, there are elements that feel new. The brand describes Power Idôle as being “for those who take charge of their own destiny, write their own rules, and succeed on their own terms.” They chose 22-year-old pop-punk star Olivia Rodrigo as the face of the campaign. In the ad, Rodrigo runs through a rose garden on her way to a stage, where she rocks out in combat boots. It’s a notable pivot from traditional advertisements, in which we may see Natalie Portman running through fields of wildflowers or Keira Knightley shooting seductive glances from a moped. In this new era, Lancôme seems to frame rose as a rebellion.

The fresh and subversive marketing of these modern rose scents is mirrored by changes in their composition. Older fragrances relied on concentrated rose absolute, while today’s lean on rose otto for softer, dewier notes, says Moltz. Take D.S. & Durga’s Rose Atlantic, a fresh, aquatic floral inspired by Moltz’s childhood summers in New England, where rosa rugosa grew along the coast. “I wanted to capture the scent of rose on the salty sea, like wind from far away. It’s not going to be overpowering, like the old-fashioned rose. It’s much more youthful and musky and soft,” Moltz says. And it’s not just the petals that Moltz draws from. There’s a green freshness to the scent, a reference to the rose’s waxy stem and leaves, which are getting more play than ever before.

Today’s rose fragrances run the gamut of scent families. There are gourmands like Aerin’s Rose Cocoa, which features cocoa bean, cinnamon, and mandarin. There are fresh aquatic takes like Rose Atlantic and woody florals like Byredo’s Young Rose. Then there are spicy, musky versions from Byredo’s Rose of No Man’s Land to Tom Ford Rose Exposed and Matiere Premiere Radical Rose. One Nordstrom customer favorite, West says, is Delina, a sweet, juicy, vanilla-tinged fragrance from Parfums de Marly. The brand has found favor on TikTok, where creators call Delina a compliment-magnet. It has even found an unexpected fan in Snoop Dogg, who pulled the baby pink, baroque-style bottle from his bag in a video interview with Vogue this summer.

Despite all the reinvention, the classics still resonate, too. “There will always be an audience for the very feminine coded, rococo, pink rose presentation,” says Murphy. Aerin’s Rose de Grasse, a straightforward marriage of three kinds of rose, remains one of the brand’s global best sellers. Old fashioned or not, there’s power in the nostalgia the most storied rose scents evoke. “They’re part of my heritage; rose was my grandmother’s favorite flower, and a scent that always connects me to her,” Lauder says. And branding aside, roses will always be fundamental to fragrance. “If in cooking there’s salt and pepper, rose is like that,” Moltz says. For a while, it seemed like the best compliment you could give a rose perfume was that it’s for people who don’t like rose. “This isn’t your grandmother’s rose perfume,” they promised. But as it turns out, grandma was onto something.

Read the original article on InStyle