Hayley Kiyoko sees perfume as her “armour”.
Hayley Kiyoko
The 29-year-old singer made her first fragrance, Hue, available for pre-orders on Friday (05.02.21) and has said she has always been obsessed with smelling good ever since she was a child.
Hayley – who is a lesbian – admitted she used the Elizabeth Arden Green Tea eau de toilette when she was still “in the closet” as a teenager, because she knew that even if she faced rejection she would still “smell good”.
She explained: “Growing up, I was in the closet and faced a lot of rejection and personal rejection. I don’t know if you remember Elizabeth Arden Green Tea? That was my armour.
“Every day I would wake up and spray way too much all over my body, and that was my confidence. I knew even if I were to be rejected by a crush or something else outside of my power, I was going to at least smell good, or I was going to be complimented like ‘Oh my gosh, what are you wearing? You smell so good.’ And those were little moments that I lived for, and they were massive moments when I look back.”
Hayley said she wanted her own fragrance to reflect the gender-neutral scent of “armour”, and also opened up on the process of putting together the perfume, which she said was “challenging and complicated”.
The ‘Girls Like Girls’ singer told Vogue magazine: “I had no idea how challenging and complicated making a perfume would be.”
And she went on to compare making perfume to songwriting, saying: “The way you rearrange the chords create a positive feeling or a negative feeling or a sad feeling or a longing feeling, so it took about 10 rounds to just get the chords, then it took about 20 rounds to get the right combination of the chords, and then I would say the final round was adjusting specific notes within the chords.
“You have an idea or a dream of what the song is going to be, and you don’t know how to create the feeling, you just have to keep creating until you feel it. It’s kind of the same thing with perfume, where you know the end result, but you don’t know what the combination is going to be.”