It’s easy to be cynical about beautiful people doing interesting things in fabulous spaces. Especially when influence is business, baby, and cultural currency is clocked in followers, sales, and AI-powered performance stats grading every moment of human interaction. Meeting someone at the tippy top of their industry who still leads with gut instincts and sensitivity can be disarming, actually, which is what I experienced in Paris sitting on a couch next to Olivier Rousteing in his sharp-shouldered black blazer. The creative director of Balmain, who’s spent 13 years creating high-drama runway collections (and building an “army” of millions of fans) reveals a new chapter today with Balmain Beauty and its Les Éternels de Balmain scent collection of 8 “different personalities” and “emotions.” He’s refreshingly honest about it all.
After a freak accident left him burned and “weakened” in 2020, Rousteing escaped from the spotlight and began thinking about a different kind of expression. It was a Tuesday after the Met Gala that he first visited Estée Lauder’s New York headquarters to discuss the idea of launching a scent, talking for hours and feeling a sense of mutual appreciation. He approached the world of perfume “with a lot of respect” and enrolled in fragrance school to find “a new way of being a creative director.” It was therapeutic to “actually express myself in a different way than I could with fashion” at a time where he admits to not feeling “as confident as before.” It helped him to reconnect with the outside, he says, and regain a kind of “momentum that maybe you lost or you forget in the back of your brain.”
His first “baby” is Carbone, a musky mix of tobacco, suede, cumin, and rose. The first time he smelled it, he had a vision—of Dove Cameron. “I got the phone call when I was on a plane back from Paris and I started to cry immediately,” Cameron tells me on a Zoom from Montreal, where she’s filming an erotic thriller (“I ve never done anything that s quite so nude or adult.”) and preparing for her next album drop. Before she received that call in October, she’d shared some early tracks with Rousteing. “I was really touched by her new songs,” he remembers, agreeing that mixing a perfect pop song is not so far from mixing a perfect scent. “There s a darkness, there s a bit of danger, there s toughness,” he says of Carbone’s notes reminding him of Cameron. “She s not trying to do something that someone else has done, and she s that kind of beauty that is so mysterious as well.”
Soon, Cameron was one of few people given access to what she describes as a “government-level” secret inside an unmarked black bottle. “I ve definitely never smelled anything like Carbone,” she says. “It is so masculine, feminine, demure, and musky. It s got all of these crazy notes.” It’s her hero scent, and she’s spent the last year “playing” and layering it with the other 7 that include Rousteing’s remixes of Pierre Balmain originals like Ivoire (which his “French coquette” grandmother once wore) and Ébène. “I m excited because I bring back the legacy of Monsieur Balmain from the time, because he was a pioneer in fragrance in 1945 and 1960,” Rousting says. “I m bringing my origins as well because I m half Ethiopian, half Somalian, so there s a lot of Africa in this collection.”
Cameron s childhood—growing up in a forest and growing up in a forest and falling asleep to her jewelry designer mother reading Vogue every night in bed—introduced Cameron to an appreciation for the life-enhancing effects of beauty in all forms. “When we talk about beauty and how important it is, it s not vanity,” she says of her mother avoiding the “judgmental cultural response” to self-care, instead instilling in Cameron the idea that it’s “a communication to the self that we matter, that we re worth investing time.” She also doesn’t feel the need to commit to a label. “I think in the original intent of beauty, sensory expression, physical and visual expression, music, movies… There s a reason why so often you find someone who does so many things—I do so many things, Olivier who does so many things—I think if you re an artist in any sense, you find a thousand avenues to express yourself.”
She and Rousteing both recognize the stigma that’s long been associated with the beauty and fragrance industry, too. “Something I hate about fashion is when fashion and beauty are not together,” Rousteing admits. “Fashion could not exist without beauty, and beauty could not exist without fashion. So I m working as much on my Balmain Beauty as on my Balmain Paris clothes,” he says, adding that the latter will “be more relevant thanks to the beauty,” not to mention more accessible to his friends and family than “my double-breasted gold jacket that cost like $3,000, and that makes me happy.” It’s already bringing people in his life closer. At Christmas with his mom, “she hugged me and she loved my fragrance,” he says, adding that at a Vogue France shoot last year, “Beyoncé hugged me and she s like, Oh my God, I love this fragrance. What are you wearing? And it was Carbone.”
Rather than acting like he can’t pick a favorite for better marketing, he likens his first scent in the collection of 8 to witnessing his first fashion show for the house walk the runway. “It s my first baby. And to be honest, I remember the first outfit that Anja Rubic was wearing when she came out that changed my life,” he says of the sparkly white-and-denim look that would actually suit his first superstar fan of the fragrance today. Plus, when you lead with heart, you can enjoy the long game. “There are so many things in this industry that don t feel quite human or they don t feel quite authentic,” says Cameron, an Emmy-winning actress and Platinum recording artist who’s been performing since the age of 8. “The idea of branding is killing self-expression, which is really killing human expression. So I think that all of these things in Olivier s brain where music is so tied to fashion, is tied to fragrance, is tied to film and photos, it s like that s the most authentic human sort of point of view—that s the artist s point of view.”
The Les Éternels de Balmain will be available to purchase in September.
