“It used to be dirty and raunchy and sexy and can we get back to that,” exclaimed Dita Von Teese about the fragrance perched on a settee alongside her collaborator Douglas Little at Bergdorf Goodman’s enchanted eveningwear nook. Von Teese and Little have been friends for more than a decade, but they have finally released their first scent together, Scandalwood, a clever play on words that the two have been thinking about for years. “We wanted to develop something that was about the idea of eccentricity, of glamour, of the mysterious and seductive,” said Little. Von Teese added, “Something that’s not a celebrity fragrance but more a beautiful fragrance with my name in fine print.” The result is an olfactory masterpiece that works for everyone (“I’m finding a lot of men are wearing it,” purred Von Teese, “which I love.”) and is composed around ideas built from both individuals’ experiences in the fragrance world. “With this fragrance, we’re riffing on what has been my signature fragrance for the last four years,” said Von Teese.
“We spun the fragrance around sandalwood [and] wanted to take it and twist it into a feminine note with dry downs of oud and white musks and leathers so that it had all the fetish-y aspects of the dangerous,” Little elaborated. But, naturally, there had to be a girlish, but not overly saccharine, foil. “At the top of it, there’s coriander, cardamom, [and] the heart of it is all Bulgarian rose. It’s very voluptuous and sensual.” Von Teese agreed and hopes that this is the start of a trend towards more seductive scents. “I think something a little bit more of a floral. Floral is always tricky. How do we twist floral and make it a little bit wicked and the fragrance of a femme fatale? For me, it’s trying to find the thing that makes it addictive and completely different than anything else I’ve ever smelled.” No doubt it achieves these things with Von Teese’s signature, mysterious magic touch.