What Does A Celestial Goddess Smell Like?

Years before she was an international pop star, a 16-year-old Jessie Ware got a job working at the men’s cologne station at the London department store Peter Jones. “My favorite thing of working on the fragrance counter is it is so subjective,” she says. “I’d just say to people, ‘I really fancy a guy who wears this one,’ and the guys are like, ‘All right, I’ll buy this one!’”

That Ware knows how to sell a fantasy is no surprise. Across acclaimed albums like What’s Your Pleasure? and That! Feels Good!, she brought equal parts soulful sophistication and winking sensuality to the early 2020s disco revival alongside Kylie Minogue, Dua Lipa, and Lady Gaga. The bigger shock? Despite Ware’s past experience in the fragrance biz — or the fact that she’s a star foodie who hosts the hit dinner-party podcast Table Manners with her mother, Lennie — she’s not exactly a nose. She finds picking out aromatic notes to be a challenge. “That’s too… I don’t know what I feel,” she says with a groan, as she holds a paper tester of Le Persona’s boozy-spicy Whispering Kiss to her nose. “I’m terrible in a wine-tasting situation.”

We’ve convened at Scent Bar NYC in NoLiTa, where the staff has graciously opened up early this late-winter morning to help the singer find a signature scent for her sixth album, Superbloom. Out April 17, the record softens the spotlit gaze of its predecessors, setting the mirrorball synths and cheeky basslines against earthier arrangements. “The album is Garden of Eden. It’s Juno the Goddess, gods and goddesses. It’s decadent, luxurious, feminine,” Ware says of the vibe, which also layers in a few moments of carnal heat for good measure: “Ride,” built around a Ennio Morricone’s instantly recognizable The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme, is a synth-pop cowboy romp that calls to mind Bianca Jagger presiding over Studio 54 on horseback. Ware tells me that a member of her management team “hated” the song at first (but eventually came around). “I think he thought it was slightly too obviously filthy,” she says. “He was like, ‘You’re better than this, Jessie.’ I was like, ‘No, I’m not.’”

“I did want the album to feel postcoital.”

Ware tells Scent Bar employees Madison and Delilah — the latter of whom is, coincidentally, dressed in a crop top emblazoned with a sparkling unicorn — that she’s aiming for the freshness of florals combined with the warmth and intimacy of musk or amber. (Her usual go-tos are Le Labo’s Another 13, which she often layers with Diptyque’s Fleur de Peau, and Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s Baccarat Rouge 540 — “like every other f*cking girl,” Ware says. “So sue me! But I like it. It is beautiful.”) The store, a brick-and-mortar outpost of Luckyscent.com, is cozy enough to accommodate only a few bodies but covered wall-to-wall in bottles — if we’re going to find the one, it’ll be here. Madison immediately pulls Blanche Bête from Liquides Imaginaires, which channels both the heavenly and the equine: The name translates to white beast in French, and its creamy mix of jasmine, tuberose, and vanillas is, apparently, meant to evoke unicorn milk.

“Oh God, that sounds like cum! Unicorn milk?!” Ware, 41, says, laughing, before turning to me: “I just learned what cum gutters are from Erika Jayne in the new episode of Housewives! Sorry, I’m completely bringing down the tone!” (For those afraid to Google: They’re the V-shaped lower-ab contours of a hot, muscly guy.) Ware takes a whiff and concludes Blanche Bête hasn’t “got enough of a zing” for her, at which point Madison offers to light it on fire — literally. Turns out, you can spray the fragrance into the shallow divot of the cap, set it ablaze, and then dab what’s left as a perfume oil. We try it, but Ware instantly recoils. “That’s too sweet! God, those unicorns!” It may not capture Superbloom in its entirety, but the show-and-tell does remind her of the album’s other hot-and-heavy moment: “That’d be fun for ‘Sauna,’ wouldn’t it?”

Before arriving at Superbloom, Ware thought she might make an even harder-edged club record to close out her disco trilogy. “Free Yourself,” a piano-pounding house banger from 2023’s That! Feels Good!, has become one of her biggest streaming hits and an international gay anthem — she just performed it the night before our rendezvous, during a semi-surprise appearance at the West Village gay bar Pieces. “That song’s taken on a life of its own,” Ware tells me later as we debrief over coffee and pastries up the street at Raf’s. “I’m still so amazed by the reaction that ‘Free Yourself’ gets. I think I was kind of addicted to that feeling. I was like, ‘I want to keep it going, this momentum!’ And then, I think, it wasn’t happening.”

She estimates she recorded enough tracks for “three different albums that I could have put out.” One batch was super pop-forward. “It felt slightly too thin for me,” she says, even though she loves listening to that kind of music. Another batch of dancier tracks felt too cold, lacking the sumptuous quality that has defined her take on dance music. But when she wrote “Automatic,” which features a spoken-word intro from actor Colman Domingo, the album cracked open: the driving, ’70s groove, yes, but also the romance, the lush melodies, the way it felt like a bridge to the alt-R&B spirit of her earlier records. “I still want to satisfy those people that were there from the start,” she says, “but with this newfound confidence and artistry.”

“I wanted to nod to Céline Dion and Whitney Houston — these songs that are emotional and don’t hold back.”

Back at Scent Bar, Ware tells the staff she’s been really into orange blossom lately — a member of her glam team has been wearing Fleurs d’Oranger by Serge Lutens, and she can’t get enough of it. The team has just the thing. Madison grabs BDK’s 312 Saint-Honoré, which pairs orange blossom with pink peppercorn, sheer musks, and some woody notes. “That’s really easy to wear,” Ware says. “Now you’re talking my language.”

Delilah, meanwhile, grabs Contre Ta Peau by Chambre52. The founder started the brand after an inspiring stay in a hotel in São Paulo, Brazil; the blood-red bottlecap is a nod to the tilework of its rooftop pool. (He hasn’t specified which hotel, but there are only so many that fit the bill.) “I’ve been there!” Ware says. “It’s all wood paneling and has these beautiful leather chairs. It’s an amazing hotel. I went there for a drink.” What’s more: The fragrance is an immediate contender. “That’s very interesting,” she says, holding the paper tester strip. “Can I smell cumin? Pink pepper? There’s a brightness that comes through.”

Ware wonders how it will fare in the summer but is assured that a citrus element in Contre Ta Peau should help it cut through humidity while holding on to its quintessential coziness. “It’s emotional, comforting,” Delilah explains. “It’s kind of maternal in a way. It’s a hug from a mother, or someone you love — because apparently this is the morning after. The story goes that he was inspired by the smell of the skin the morning after they spent the night.”

Ware is pleased. “The album, I did want it to feel postcoital,” she says. But Superbloom also peels back the curtain on her family life in a way she hasn’t in years. After trying to dodge a reputation for being just a “ballad girl” with 2010s hits like “Wildest Moments” and “Say You Love Me,” Ware returns to the form with the bittersweet piano number “16 Summers” — the title refers to the idea you only have 16 summers with your children before they get busy with their own lives and stop wanting to hang out with you. (Ware and her personal trainer husband, Sam Burrows — teenage sweethearts who make long-term commitment sound, frankly, hot on Superbloom’s title track — have kept the names of their three kids, ages 9, 7, and 4, private and cover their faces on social media.) “It is quite musical theater, and that may be Marmite for some people, but for me, I wanted to nod to David Foster and Céline Dion and Whitney Houston,” she says of the song. “It’s got nostalgia for me of growing up on these kinds of songs that are emotional and don’t hold back.”

Ware had also been listening to a lot of the late soul singer Minnie Riperton, mother of Maya Rudolph, and admired how she seamlessly nodded to family life on songs like “Lovin’ You.” “I think for a while, I’d had an aversion to allow the private in,” Ware says. Her 2017 album, Glasshouse, which delved deep into anxieties of having her first child “in an incredibly fearful way,” she says, also coincided with a low point in her career. Wracked with working-mother guilt and stressed about the economic realities of touring as a parent, she considered walking away from music. The surprise success of Table Manners, which has spawned live tapings and a cookbook, ultimately took the pressure off being the breadwinner with her music career. (Recent podcast guests include Hilary Duff, Chaka Khan, and Margot Robbie.) Then, in another twist, the palate-cleaning escapism she sought in What’s Your Pleasure? opened up a whole new audience and took her career to new commercial heights: She just announced her biggest tour yet, including arena shows in the U.K. and the iconic Radio City Music Hall in New York.

Superbloom is Ware’s attempt to integrate her worlds. “When I started out, it was always: ‘You’re supposed to be ageless,’” she says. Which really means you’re supposed to be forever young. “Celebrating vignettes and scenes of domesticity is my life, and I love it — whilst being able to get the whip out and pretend that I’m riding a cowboy is also a desire or a need and a want, and that’s OK. They don’t have to erase each other.”

Not that Superbloom is lacking in camp moments. Next on our scent safari, Ware tries out Soleil d’Ikosim from Infiniment Coty Paris, which takes the orange blossom theme to the Amalfi Coast with salty, citrus, and neroli notes — a spiritual match, Ware decides, for the Superbloom standout “Don’t You Know Who I Am?” The song is a head-turning splash of belt-for-the-gods divadom in which Ware steps into the persona of “Shirley Bloom,” a nod to the larger-than-life U.K. icon Shirley Bassey, as she confronts a lover caught with another woman.

Bassey, of course, is best known to American audiences for her run of Bond themes in the ’60s and ’70s. What do we need to go to get Ware on the next one? “Don’t you kind of have to be in the cultural zeitgeist, fully at the forefront?” she says almost solemnly, as if the idea is out of reach. But as anyone who has heard the cat-and-mouse seduction of “Selfish Love” or the cinematic grandeur of “Begin Again” can attest, Ware would suit the 007 franchise perfectly. “Maybe my time will come when I’m, like, 50,” she says. “I don’t intend on leaving anytime soon. I’m having to learn patience, but I’m really content with how it’s all going.”

She describes performing at the BAFTAs in February as a door-opening moment for her. Ware covered Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were,” a notoriously hard song to sing, for the awards show’s in-memoriam segment, a notoriously tough act in awards shows. “I think that did put me on a bit of a world stage to be like this is my voice,” she says. “And it wasn’t meant to be about me — I just wanted to sing it well. I think I’m just ready to show people a bit more.”

“Celebrating domesticity is my life, and I love it — but being able to get the whip out and pretend that I’m riding a cowboy is also a desire, and that’s OK. They don’t have to erase each other.”

Now on a quest for the perfect Bond girl scent — why not? — the Scent Bar staff pull 45° by Trudon, whose sultry vanilla and honey notes get tentative approval. That is, until Ware tries Nasomatto’s Narcotic V.: A pheromone-mimicking scent with spicy, savory floral notes, it’s an instant hit. “That’s really nice,” Ware says with Herbal Essences-level enthusiasm as we move from paper testers to skin tests on our wrists. “Spray me all over, guys!” Madison explains that the perfumer developed this one by giving it to sex workers in Amsterdam and keeping track of how many compliments they reported getting. “I love that story! That’s ‘Mr. Valentine!’ That’s f*cking ‘Mr. Valentine!’” Ware says, referring to Superbloom’s come-hither midpoint.

It’s decision time. Ware looks at Contre Ta Peau. “That just feels timeless, like it is from another world. That feels like it could have been from a mythological era,” she says — a bull’s-eye on the Superbloom moodboard. But the backstory of Narcotic V. is too good to resist.

“It smells like you have fishnets on and you’re doing the thing and you’re a little sweaty afterwards, but in a good way,” Delilah offers.

“Oh,” Ware says flatly. “OK. That doesn’t sell it to me, babe, I have to say.”

“Or it smells like you’re a carriage back in the day, like you’re a princess — but dirty.”

“Oh my God, Bridgerton!” she shouts, suddenly back on board. “It’s Nicola Coughlan getting fingered in the back of the carriage!” Bridgerton is very Superbloom.

Ware settles on getting both, and when Scent Bar surprises her by gifting the bottles, she insists on paying for a third: Levant by Ormonde Jayne, whose juicy, sherbet-esque take on orange blossom and citrus had been an earlier contender. And really, for an album about celebrating all parts of yourself — the grounded parts, the sexy parts, the fun parts — was one bottle ever going to suffice?

“I feel like it can be with you in any shape or form: the late-night one-on-one after hours — or breakfast with the family on a Sunday,” Ware says of Superbloom. She hopes fans will receive it as an invitation to live big, or at least live fully. “I want them to be immersed,” she continues. “I want them to be lost for a moment. I want them to feel confident, like they’ve just had the most luxurious bubble bath or the most divine encounter with the love of their love. I want them to feel something, and I want that to feel romantic and sensual and delightful.” No message, just pleasure — a full-bottle-worthy feeling.