To Create Rick Owens Toothpaste, He Tried Being Rick Owens & "Loved Every Second"
What do you do when you learn that Rick Owens, the famously freaky world-conquering fashion designer, is privately a daily enjoyer of your product? “I literally spat out the coffee I was drinking, then I immediately texted and called 30 people to tell them about it,” says Kristoffer Vural, founder of artisanal oral care company Selahatin, who learned the news that Owens uses Selahatin toothpaste through a passing remark in an article.
But once the shock had subsided, Vural’s entrepreneurial mindset kicked in. He ran adverts highlighting that he is the maker of Rick Owens’ favorite toothpaste, one of which popped up on Owens’ phone. “I thought that was bold,” admitted Owens in a statement, but he was impressed by Selahatin’s cheekiness and got in touch.
“At first I thought he'd be mad and wanted it offline, so I quickly instructed my team to take the advert down,” says Vural. “'There goes the dream of working together,' I assumed. But it turned out he wasn’t upset at all. It proved to be the opposite.” Instead, Owens proposed that the two collaborate.
The fruits of their labor are a newly released, all-encompassing kit for oral health.
The duo has developed a bespoke aroma, where top notes of Sichuan pepper, verbena, and Madagascar vanilla mingle with wafts of dark citrus and black pepper.
“It’s radically different from anything else we offer, but it’s probably the one I’m most proud of,” says Vural. “Rick Owens embodies a kind of primitive elegance, and I wanted the aroma to capture that type of brutalist grace: raw, contradictory, and unapologetic. The notes are deliberately atypical, but they fall into a harmony that you wouldn’t expect.”
Developing such a radically unconventional scent isn’t easy. And Rick Owens, in typical Rick Owens fashion, was persistently hunting for ways to further push the envelope.
“Rick urged: ‘Go harder. I smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and gin — I need something stronger,’” says Vural. “So while I was developing the aroma, I picked up smoking, started to drink coffee and gin, and I would wear my favourite Rick pieces to get into character and to experience the aroma from his perspective. I loved every second of it.”
Vural, who says Rick Owens has been a hero of his for 15 years, has infused the odour that came from his Rick Owens cosplay into a whitening toothpaste, mouthwash, and Eau d’Extrait Oral (the latter is a portable “perfume for the mouth,” according to Selahatin). These are priced between €40 and €50 (around $45 to $60). Then there’s the €65 (around $75) toothbrush, handmade using animal horns discarded by the meat industry and finished with authentic boar bristles.
It’s all the essentials you need to keep your mouth in good condition, but elevated under the watchful eye of fashion’s subversive lord of darkness. Rick Owens brushes his teeth daily like the rest of us mere mortals, but the designer doesn’t perform this everyday act using basic apparatus. Rick Owens believes “you don’t need to have many things, but that essential things [like a toothbrush] should be made special.”
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