Photo: Courtesy of Cyrus Veyssi Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story Welcome to The Scoop , a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week.
This week’s guest is Cyrus Veyssi. A trained actor and performer, Cyrus found themselves without auditions and a lot of time to fill during the pandemic. So they began posting about fashion and beauty, and as they say, for a bit they were flopping. Then one day they decided to try something a little more real, and posted a funny TikTok about “bonding with their straight dad” at a barbecue. Within a day, the post had gained 10 million views.
I was one of those 10 million, and have been following Cyrus ever since. As they built their platform over the years, they began weaving in more content about products they loved, and just last week they were announced in the role of May in the Broadway production of & Juliet . It’s all come full circle. But the news doesn’t stop there, so I called Cyrus to hear about something else they are cooking up.
About a year and a half ago, Le Monde Gourmand reached out and asked if I wanted to create a fragrance with them. At first, I thought it was one of those licensing deals where I’d just have to slap my name on something, so I wasn’t interested. But it turns out they were giving me full creative control. They got in touch because they had seen me post about Miel Bébé, a fragrance I must have bought more than 40 bottles of over the years. We are now ready to launch L’Essence Shirin, which is the most beautiful iteration of the dozens created throughout the process. It will be available in Ulta stores across the US and Gourmandbeauty.com from October 5.
My mom used to own a boutique in Paris many years ago, which carried a fragrance called Reminiscence. She brought it to the US and carried many fragrances that they created for the store. I always smelled notes of patchouli and amber at home and in the store. When we first started to brainstorm, I wanted to create a sweet but fresh-smelling fragrance that would bring me back to my childhood and remind me of my Persian heritage. Pomegranate felt like the perfect starting point because it’s both tart and lush. And I love the idea of pairing that with juicy, bright, and warmer qualities like amber and jasmine.
Fragrance is famously hard to advertise. Any teasers you can share with us about how you might approach it on your social media channel?
I have lots of videos we have filmed with my family, which I can’t wait to release. And a lot of it is with my mum, who is very picky. We’ve filmed these sort of reaction videos of her not knowing it was my fragrance because I always bring fragrances home to her. And we just got the best reaction. Of course, we also filmed with my dad — funny videos of him wanting to take credit for creating the fragrance and so forth.
Behind the scenes of a shoot with Cyrus Veyssi.
I never really understood why fragrance was marketed in a binary way. Why can I not wear cologne if I have boobs?
I was in a bar in New Jersey, of all places, with a friend of mine, and these two guys in their 40s came up to me, and they were like, “What fragrance are you wearing? It smells really good.” I started explaining to them what it was and said, “Your wives will love it.” They were like, “No, we’d like it for us.” That’s when I thought, OK, we nailed the brief, because I always thought about fragrance as so intimate and personal, and expanding across…