I Am Love star Tilda Swinton is the latest celebrity to cross over into perfume-making, and she knows she’s an unlikely actress for a “slash” job. “It’s not something I ever, in a million Sundays, would have thought anyone would have asked me to do, because I don’t really know about fragrance and I don’t really care about fragrance,” she admitted last night, seated on a stool at Henri Bendel for her perfume launch. “I’ve worn one fragrance for 25 years: Penhaligon’s Bluebell.” (An aside: What is with celebrities just coming out and admitting that they really know nothingabout their side gigs?) But Swinton rightly points out that playing with a bunch of raw scents to throw something hopefully lovely into a bottle is pretty fun! “When I realized what they were really offering me was the opportunity to go into the kindergarten and mess around and have absolute final cut and put whatever I wanted into this bottle, I couldn’t resist. So I had a real ball! I thought about how great it would be if I could have a smell that would keep me at home wherever I was. So I started to think about my home smells, and the principal ingredients became ginger, baby carrot, pumpkin. I’m a November child — a pumpkin child — so this whole idea of orange is there. It smells like the only home I have: my house in the north of Scotland.” And, of course, the actress’s scent is “omnisex,” she said.
Vulture recently held a Tilda Swinton–themed haiku contest, and she met the winners two nights ago at her I Am Love premiere! “I couldn’t believe how great they were,” she said. “The fact that I’m in a haiku with John Travolta?! That’s amazing.” She now plans to read all of the submitted haikus, and she even made her own for us, titled “Nothing Else Makes Sense”:
Vulture recently held a Tilda Swinton–themed haiku contest, and she met the winners two nights ago at her I Am Love premiere! “I couldn’t believe how great they were,” she said. “The fact that I’m in a haiku with John Travolta?! That’s amazing.” She now plans to read all of the submitted haikus, and she even made her own for us, titled “Nothing Else Makes Sense”:
“I sit on a stripey
stool in Bendel’s.
Smelling of ginger.”
She added: “Nothing else about me is true.”
