NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 03: Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen attend the 2019 CFDA Fashion Awards- ...
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Beauty

The Olsen Twins Are Back In The Fragrance Business

The Row debuted its first scents, exclusively available in brick-and-mortar stores.

by Sam Neibart

If you’ve been holding onto the same bottle Elizabeth & James Nirvana Black since 2013, anxiously awaiting the return of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to the fragrance realm, the twins’ latest announcement is for you. The Olsen sisters’ luxury clothing line, The Row has just debuted a series of new scents. However, these fragrances won’t be easy to swoop up online as some of the Olsens’ past beauty ventures. On brand with the The Row’s luxe minimalist aesthetic, the new scents are actually hand-blended, small-batch fragrance oils that will be available exclusively in brick-and-mortar The Row stores.

The new oils were created in collaboration with artisan perfumer of the L’Oeil du Vert fragrance line, Haley Alexander Van Oosten. L’Oeil du Vert is known for creating exclusive, one-off fragrance oils from rare botanicals, both locally sourced and discovered from Van Oosten’s travels. The resulting scents are essentially unreproducible from the original small batch blends.

According to Wall Street Journal, the Olsens first met Van Oosten as a fan of her botanical fragrances and their collaboration came about as a natural evolution of their relationship. The sentiment is echoed on the L’Oeil du Vert Instagram account, which posted one of the first images of the exclusive oils with the caption, “Over 3 years in the making — 3 oils for 2 women who work as 1. R O & W @therow”.

Per The Row’s website, the collection is “a trio of hand-blended oils exploring the elusive essence of sandalwood.” The three oils, each named after one letter in the word “row,” have their own unique olfactive profiles that are meant to enhance the character of sandalwood in a different way. R is supposed represent the warm embracing side of sandalwood, including notes of tobacco leaves (inspired by Mary-Kate’s famous bowls of cigarettes at her wedding, perhaps?), burnt Esfand seeds, and rose. O, is meant to amplify sandalwood’s “power to envision” via the edition of blue water lily, olibanum (frankincense), and iris root. While W, contains amber, floral champa, and incense woods, and is meant to amplify the uplifting nature of the focus ingredient.

While the scents sound positively hypnotic, due to the fragrances’ rare, expensive ingredients and artisanal, small-batch nature, each individual oil costs between $490 and $550, making it harder to cop the Olsen twins’ essence than we would hope. But for The Row customer, it’s sure to be the ideal accent to the brand’s cashmere sweaters and structured trousers. We will continue to watch this space if they ever decide to make the fragrance of their elusive aura more available to the masses.