Daily Times

When British make-up artist Charlotte Tilbury started working in the fashion industry more than 20 years ago, her claim to fame was “the Tilbury tap”-a skin-prep technique involving a base of homespun moisturiser that clients asked for by its unofficial name: Magic Cream. “That’s why I was booked,” Charlotte Tilbury admits, “to create dreamy skin.” Three years ago, the flame-haired face painter made it official by including the illuminating and plumping salve in her debut product range, which brought easy-to-use colour kits and relatable, complete looks to her legions of fans. Key to the line’s success has been Tilbury’s mission to “bring glamour back” to beauty by channelling an unabashed femininity that she feels can be universally achieved. “When you put someone’s make-up on, you can make them look like the most attractive and beautiful version of themselves,” she tells me on an early-summer afternoon at her offices in West London. Tilbury is wearing her de facto uniform, a vintage bohemian dress and sky-high heels; her signature auburn strands have been teased to bombshell proportions. But we are not talking about her make-up collection today, as Tilbury is preparing to launch her second beauty offering: a very personal fragrance project called Scent of a Dream.

“I believe there is a thread,” she says of the link between both endeavours while cradling the perfume’s faceted, talisman-like flacon between bejewelled fingers. The most obvious connection is that, much like her Magic Cream, the original Scent of a Dream is something Tilbury concocted herself. As a girl growing up in Ibiza, she used to mix her own oils and essences. “People always wanted to know what I was wearing,” she recalls. But the fragrance also builds on the hedonistic sensuality she has become known for: While Tilbury’s cosmetics affect physical attraction on a visual level, her fragrance has been formulated to generate “an emotional pathway to the brain and to the sex receptors.” In other words, she continues, it is designed to incite “a desire that you can’t control”.

Whether Scent Of A Dream is capable of the kind of seduction that can produce “olfactory ecstasy”, as Tilbury claims, is not quantifiable. But psychoactive notes like fire-tree, amber, and the synthetic compound Hedione-which react with the body’s own pheromones and have a proven neurological effect-are hard to resist when blended with big bursts of erotic florals like rose, tuberose, and jasmine. “I have perfume stalkers,” Tilbury insists, recounting stories about being chased through airports and into the bathroom at London’s Chiltern Firehouse by women-and men-desperate to know the name of her perfume.

Bottling that kind of unforgettable allure comes down to Tilbury’s infectious “witchy electricity”, offers model Kate Moss, an old friend and the face of the fragrance. The supermodel, who is also godmother to Tilbury’s two children, received the perfume’s first sample and remains a big fan. “I spray myself in the misting way that Marilyn Monroe used to spray a halo around her. There is an old-school drama to it,” Kate Moss explains of the indulgent application technique.

The Moss/Monroe comparison is one that Tilbury likes to make as well when discussing the kinds of women who physically embody Scent Of A Dream, women who can “change the molecular structure of a room” by entering it. There is a similar power in leaving a fragrance trail just as distinctive.