“I’ve just been hibernating in my apartment,” Hayley Kiyoko tells me over the phone. “This is the first year I haven’t written down a resolution. Every single year I write down goals, I write 10 very specific goals that are all career based. And this is the first year–it turned 2021, and I’m just open and ready to receive whatever comes my way and whatever aligns.” Typically a “stubborn Aries,” she sees this as a good thing. Rest is a welcome change. At home in Los Angeles, the singer-songwriter, music video director and actress (from Disney to CSI, and that time Issa Rae cast her for Insecure’s “Hella LA” grocery store episode) is hitting the high notes of passing time in lockdown.
She’s become a personal chef: “I’ve learned to cook for myself, and that’s been a huge distraction and something that quite honestly takes most of your day,” she laughs. “If you’re making breakfast, lunch, and dinner, like, there goes eight hours!”
She’s brought back the Sunday drive: “That is the new thing—to just like, take a cruise!”
She’s streamlined her most basic essentials: “I need to be able to leave my house once a day and get some form of fresh air, even if it’s just stepping outside, and I need to have a phone call with one person a day,” she says. “I know that those are my necessities to not lose it when you’re isolating.”
And fulfilling a “number one” priority, she’s created her first fragrance, Hue, an eau de parfum that will be available to pre-order this Friday. In its soft-edged, gold-plaqued, red glass flacon, Hue is designed to be a gender-neutral scent of “armor.” Kiyoko understands that fragrance has serious power. “Growing up, I was in the closet and faced a lot of rejection and personal rejection,” she says of her school years in WestLake Village, California. “I don’t know if you remember Elizabeth Arden Green Tea?” she asks of the eau de toilette popular in the early aughts. I tell her I do. I had it, I wore it, I shared it with my best friend. “That was my armor,” says Kiyoko. “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.”
Signing a fragrance deal has become so ubiquitous amongst megastars that the actual meaning—not to mention the work (many perfumers are in school for as long as doctors)—behind crafting a perfume can be lost in the transaction. But not, clearly, for Kiyoko. “I had no idea how challenging and complicated making a perfume would be,” she admits. And, though initial conversations started in 2019, the real work happened during a pandemic. Slate Brands connected her with perfumer Constance Georges-Picot, and Kiyoko would receive boxes of samples to review in virtual meetings. They went through about 60 iterations of the scent before landing on Hue’s final bouquet. The pop star compares sampling fragrance accords to songwriting. “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,” she says of chasing an instinct for Hue in the same way she would for a track. “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.”
It was an editing process that helped her better pinpoint her own tastes. “I thought I wanted watermelon, but it was actually rose,” she says of finding the heart of her fragrance after trying to figure out what drew her to another notch in her scent evolution, Dolce & Gabbana 3 L'Imperatrice, aka “D&G 3.” To hit a “warm and cozy” note within Hue, she realized that she liked musk more than the vanilla, cinnamon, or shea butter options she tested. But not too much. “I live in Los Angeles, and you have everyone in Silver Lake, and all of the cool artsy people, they all wear musk. Skin musk is the thing.” She found that blood orange and freesia were worthy top notes, lychee and pink magnolia could hang out in the mix, and an exclusive “special cacao” ingredient wrapped it all in a bow. “You’re discovering certain parts of yourself and what you love,” says Kiyoko. “That's what’s so great about creating art, you’re given these mini gifts along the way where you’re learning more about yourself.”
The artwork for Hue, an abstract portrait of Kiyoko, was another opportunity to convey a message. “I was really inspired by creating a palette that was similar to a rainbow but still kind of left of center, and my graphic designer Liz Hirsch painted it and I was like ‘oh my gosh, this is it, this should be the hero image,’” she shares. The end goal, with everything Hue encompasses, is to strike a balance that welcomes anyone that wants to be a part of it. “This is not just me releasing a perfume to release a perfume,” says Kiyoko. “Perfume has been a massive part of my queer experience. I remember feeling famous in middle school because girls said that I smelled good. They wouldn’t date me. They didn’t have crushes on me. But they said I smelled good, and that was like a huge thing for me, and I’ve carried that throughout my life,” she continues. “I want to give that power and that armor to my fans, even if they’re sitting at home!”
Now she’s sitting at home, too, and in the process of mixing her next album. She has no idea when it will roll out, and that’s fine. Even freeing. “It’ll be ready when it’s ready, and it’ll happen when it’s ready to happen, and for now, I have this incredible perfume that I’m so proud of,” Kiyoko says. “Something I learned from 2020 is like, good things will happen when they’re ready to happen. And if you focus on yourself and make sure you have the tools to really be able to confront any challenges and change, then you can find peace.”