Gwyneth Paltrow Is Launching Natural Perfume (Daughter Apple Remains Unconvinced)

When it comes to beauty, we’ll try basically anything Gwyneth Paltrow recommends (aside from the bee-sting facials). After all, she’s tried just about everything in her career as an actress and a beauty entrepreneur — and oh yeah, her skin looks like that at 44. And while she’s already enlightened our skincare routines with her collection of healthy products, she’s taking her expertise one step further to convince us that even your fragrance can be good for you. Here’s what you need to know about her first foray into perfume: Edition 01, which she created with all natural ingredients.

“I am such a fragrance girl,” Paltrow told editors at an N.Y.C. launch for the scent. “I love so much, and I think it’s so transportive and powerful and it can take you back in time, it can take you forward in time to dreams of your life, and I just think it’s amazing.”

But as a lover of fragrances and all things natural, she was having a hard time reconciling one with the other. So, following the lead of the skincare products in her Goop line, she created a safe alternative that’s just as luxe as it is good for you.

“We want to create fragrance that isn’t harmful, especially to our daughters who are growing and developing and I think we really all deserve that,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”

For her daughter, it’s more than just fragrance that she’s worried about. Paltrow tells The Cut that her 12-year-old daughter, Apple, is immersed in all things beauty — making it much more important for Paltrow to make a change.

“This is an area where I’m still in education mode, but she’s very into makeup, YouTube tutorials, and conventional makeup. That is one of the reasons why I want to do this even more,” she explains. “My daughter loves the Pink body fragrance. She’s like, ‘I want the Pink body mist.’ And I let her do her thing! Because I can just educate her.” (Son Moses takes less convincing, she says: “My son is more like, ‘Is this a clean body wash?’ He’s so funny.”)

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One might thing a fragrance created by blonde California girl Paltrow would be a fresh, sunny fragrance, but what she created is quite the opposite — which stemmed from her “other side,” she explains. The scent, which smells of Labdanum, frankincense and cypress, is a darker, sexy smell, which embodies her “mystical” persona.

For Paltrow, scent and memory are totally linked, and it’s not just the obvious ones. “When I smell onions sautéing in butter, that to me is the smell of love and home. It’s so strong for me. My mom was always sautéing onions in butter,” she tells The Cut. “When I think about all my worst break-ups or when my dad died, I remember smoking to get through. I think of that raw tobacco and burning tobacco smell.”

And as she explains to PeopleStyle, there’s another bonus to having a fragrance made out of safe ingredients, rather than chemicals: They all serve a dual purpose. “What I have learned is that there are incredible healing powers in flowers, in herbs, in barks, in plants,” she says. “So we hired this amazing woman to take us through what was in the fragrance and tell us what the healing properties are. So it’s good for meditation, its good for anti-depression, there’s an aphrodisiac in there.”

You also might enjoy the relaxing properties once you hear the price (it’s $165 for the fragrance, $70 for the candle), but Paltrow says that the cost is fair considering the ingredients she’s chosen. “We just make less money,” she says of her business model. “The margins in synthetic fragrance are insane, and ours are a normal margin. But it’s worth it — it’s beyond worth it.”

Will you try Paltrow’s new scent? Sound off below.