Sabrina Carpenter Is Gen Z’s Queen of Celebrity Fragrance
To say that Sabrina Carpenter is the biggest pop star of 2024 is no exaggeration — her singles "Espresso" and "Please Please Please" continue to top the charts, the public is fawning over her relationship with Saltburn star Barry Keoghan, and brands like Marc Jacobs and SKIMS are clamoring to partner with her as she prepares to release her sixth studio album, Short n' Sweet.
On top of all that, she's building a perfume empire.
On July 18, Carpenter (who is also a Highsnobiety cover star) announced the launch of her third fragrance, Cherry Baby. Now, one week later, it's available to shop at a new website — fragrancebysabrina.com — dedicated to her olfactive projects. (Check back at 2 p.m. ET, when it officially drops.)
This isn't Carpenter's first fragrance. In 2022 she released Sweet Tooth, a sugary concoction packaged in a bottle shaped like a chocolate bar. A year later she followed with Sweet Tooth Caramel Dream, an equally dessert-like flanker. Both perfumes were made in partnership with Scent Beauty, a platform that has produced fragrances for Kylie Minogue and Dolly Parton.
It seems that Carpenter's taste for gourmands hasn't gone anywhere. Her forthcoming scent, also created with Scent Beauty, is a cherry-forward perfume with additional notes of apple, brown sugar, peony, musk, and patchouli.
“It has a bubbly feel that’s like a Cherry Cosmo or a Shirley Temple, but it’s also very rich,” she told Business of Fashion . "I didn’t want it to feel like it was synthetic in any sort of way. It can be playful... But not fake.”
Carpenter's penchant for edible notes isn't just on trend — it also harkens to the heyday of celebrity fragrances in the early 2000s. There was Britney Spears' Fantasy, which features notes of white chocolate and lychee; Paris Hilton's fruity Heiress; and Jessica Simpson's Cupcake, part of her Dessert Beauty line.
Celebrity fragrance, a phenomenon that started with Elizabeth Taylor's White Diamonds, is enjoying a resurgence. As much as we love, say, Victoria Beckham's Suite 302 and Harry Styles' Rivulets (both of which released this year), the celebrity perfume sphere seems to be getting bogged down with self-seriousness. These Hollywood-backed scents are being marketed (and priced) as luxuries comparable to offerings from long-standing fragrance houses like Diptyque and Le Labo.
On the other hand, Sabrina Carpenter keeps things straightforward. Sweet Tooth retails for an approachable $30; Cherry Baby starts at $9.99 for a 10-milliliter bottle (50 mililiters goes for $54.99).
There's nothing pretentious about it — much like the great celebrity perfumes of the early aughts, it's just fun. What Fantasy was for Millennials, Carpenter's forthcoming fragrance might just become for Gen Z.
