For decades, it was hard to get most supermodels to cop to more than “drinking a lot of water” when asked for their wellness routines. On this front, however, Bella Hadid does not disappoint. Nearly eight million people on TikTok have watched her throw back a fistful of vitamins (chased down by green juice, sea moss, and a croissant) while showcasing a worthy collection of vibe-checking crystals and a smattering of health-food-store-procured essential oils. If you’ve been to enough hippie grocers, a distinct aroma starts to form in the back of your nose as you watch her mix and match droplets together on her wrist. Maybe it takes you to a specific place. Maybe it takes you to a specific time in your life. But it transports you. For Hadid, that’s the magic.
Today, the activist, model, perfumer launches 'Ôrebella, a unisex, alcohol-free, essential oil-forward fragrance brand in crystal-shaped vessels that bottle up the scents of Hadid’s formative memories. Scent has long been studied as a mechanism to recall memories and emotional ties. Biologically, that’s because our olfactory system relays information to our brain’s limbic system (or the area of the brain that processes memories, emotion, and mood). Here, Hadid talks about how she started concocting different essential oil blends for her family and friends, which ultimately pushed her to found her new line; the memories that informed them; and the central part of every wellness routine: making the perfect grilled cheese.
Bella Hadid: It really started like when I was younger. I remember my parents having a love for oils and my history and my ancestors just being able to like concoct different oils. I found out a couple of years ago that one of my uncle was making essential oils and I found one of his bottles and it was a beautiful thing. Halfway through my process of developing 'Ôrebella, like finding out that, you know, my bloodlines loved it also, and my passion wasn’t just a singular passion; it was something that like was in my roots and in my values and that was a beautiful thing that kept me wanting to move forward.
My family and I would plant 2600 lavender plants at home at the farm, and so we always had all this oil, and I was obsessed with lavender oil. There's one scent that has a little bit of lavender in it. I became obsessed with making these very unique and different and a little bit weird scents that I just thought the market hadn't seen yet—but at that point, I was just making them for myself.
I would go to our health food store. I just started putting them together with glycerin and making these bases and then making different scents and then starting to make samples at my house. I was coming up with so many different things and at some point I realized this might be special enough that I could share it with the world.
Well, my first one I ever made was like lemongrass, lavender, bergamot, black pepper and a little bit of ginger. That was the original scent that I was wearing all the time. Then, I would start to want to make stuff with like lavender and vanilla—sexier blends. At that point, my nose was getting more intricate. I was like, okay, well, what if I do this with something that is on the complete other end of spectrum? Like, let's do something really, really sweet and then add something that's spicy, and then if I add something woody, it'll make it a little bit more masculine—as a woman. To have those days where I can be a little bit more masculine—to come to the table with something different—was important to me.
[The scent] Salted Muse is my take on more masculine scent. What I really wanted by all of this was for people—any age, any walk of life, any gender—to be able to wear and be excited about it and not have it be like super-feminine based or super-masculine based—have it be for anybody anywhere who enjoys the smell and the beauty of essential oil. The minute that it hits your skin, it actually, changes your ph and your ph is able to like kind of make it smell a little bit more like you…it kind of becomes unique and for you, the wearer.
Blooming Fire basically, is a scent that is kind of nostalgic to how I grew up, whether it was on the beach or with my family. You know, watching the sun go down on the beach and everyone's just sitting around together and I like wrap myself in a little sweater or a towel, and we're still wet from getting out of the ocean and you just kind of still smell your like sunscreen.
At the time, there was this this sun oil that my mom would always use and it had monoi in it, and I—just like my sister—loved Tahiti. She would go with her friends a lot when she was younger with our godparents’ family. This one is really for my sister and an ode to how we grew up on the beach together, the best of friends. That Tahitian monoi, for me, is like just a very nostalgic smell.
Really, it was like Santa Barbara, with the kids that I grew up with and their parents barbecuing on the beach at Butterfly Beach in Santa Barbara. And then my dad—we grew up going to Punta Mita and Puerto Vuerta, being in Mexico, being with the kids from town. I would just like walk down the beach, I would meet a bunch of kids. We never spoke the same language but just through being kids and like having love, like we could communicate. I think that kind of goes back to that smell: being with people you love and being on the beach.
Salted Muse is kind of like the scent of like the ocean, almost when you get tumbled in a wave and water goes up your nose and it's a really horrible feeling, but then the smell of the scent of the ocean is in your entire face. This was one that was really fun because it has salt and peppercorn and olive tree and lavender. Again, I owe to my heritage with the olive tree. As you know, a child of an Arab father, we put olive oil on everything. I really wanted to do something with that and so that was really important to me for Salted Muse.
[Salted Muse] reminds me of my uncle and my grandfather, and that's what's exciting. Women love this and men love this—and I think that's really, really cool that that gender sort of aspect of it. All our fragrances are quite unisex as well and I love the idea of layering them.
Everybody so far, likes them—I hope they're not lying to me. They love it. My sister’s is definitely Blooming Fire. My mom loves Salted Muse. My friends all we would come around when I would get new samples and we would try them out, and I'd be like, don't you think we should add this in here?
My partner—probably two-and-a-half or three years ago he said my favorite word is “concoct” because I just cannot stop saying it, because I just love to experiment and make things. He's like, you realize you just put four different samples together and I'm like, yeah, but does it smell good? He's like it does. It's our next launch.
I really want people to like mix and match them, you know? Style your clothes, then you can style your perfume. These are beautiful on their own, but then when you mix them, it does give them different values and you can start to smell different parts of them. I think that's really cool about this product is that you can buy all three scents but you have like 45 ways of wearing all of them, you know what I mean? Being able to like style it on your own and make it unique and different for yourself is really cool and important to me.
I'm pretty sure we do the same things every day. Like when I'm not working, I'm really just, I don't know how many special things there are about me that I can say that are different—I just I use Sensodyne toothpaste….I can't do a cartwheel. I can't whistle. I make a really good grilled cheese.
The sourdough bread. There's actually this one trainer that makes incredible sourdough bread at the horse show.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.