Jessica Simpson has always had a flair for fragrance. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that her teenage daughter Maxwell Johnson would follow suit. That said, Johnson’s knowledge and passion for this particular corner of beauty has exceeded Simpson’s wildest expectations.
Gen Z’s Impact On Perfume
“We call Maxwell the nose,” said the celebrity brand trailblazer, who just launched her latest fragrance, Mystic Canyon Eau de Parfum, timed to the 20th anniversary of her eponymous lifestyle collection. “For her birthday, my mom and I took her to a perfumery in Paris and she took maybe four-and-a-half-hours to create her own fragrance. She was teaching me how important the top note is. It’s just so interesting. I’ve learned more from my 13-year-old than I did from any of the heads at the companies I work with. It was interesting what she gravitated to.”
Upon launching her first new scent in five years—an amber floral fall fragrance sold exclusively at JCPenney for $60 (3.4 oz.)—Simpson acknowledged a whole new generation she may have to target next time.
“With Maxwell, we were like, wow, we really need to create something for her age group because she just really understands it,” Simpson said. “And even the people at the perfumery were like, can you come work here? It was fun and she was very thorough. I think I was yawning, but she’ll even tell you it was like the best day of her life.”
Dating back to her Dessert Beauty days of 2004, Simpson has proved herself a fragrance enthusiast. And even during her youth, she says fragrances shaped many of her memories and who she is today. Even so, she’s amazed with the way her daughter and her friends are able to navigate so many more options than when she was growing up.
“My daughter goes to a Sephora or an Ulta and I look in the basket when we go to checkout and it’s like every little version of everything there is,” Simpson said. “She probably has, I want to say, at least 45 different perfumes. It’s really amazing. And the one that she created is so great, too. I told her we might have to do a subsidiary line and have her do one for her age. Maxwell’s an intuitive scent seeker, and I see that her generation is the same.”
Johnson’s passion for perfume reflects a current generational trend, as recently covered by Reuters, which noted, “It is a product segment that gives consumers a taste of prestige, quality, status or personal indulgence without the price tag of full-blown premium or luxury goods.” The article also referenced recent Circana data that reported prestige fragrance sales increased by 6% to $3.9 billion in the first half of 2025, while prestige makeup sales only rose by 1% and prestige skincare declined 1% during the same period.
Simpson’s Past And Present Perfume Influences
For Simpson’s part, she embraced many of the scents that defined her generation (from mass to luxury).
“I was definitely the mall shopper that went into Bath & Body Works,” she said. “I would always get the vanilla scent. My cousin would always get Freesia or Plumeria. Then my friend would get the cucumber one. Every guy I dated wore Abercrombie Woods or Obsession. I used to wear Amarige by Givenchy in high school, which is actually quite sophisticated.”
This made Simpson’s appearance at Glendale Galleria in Los Angeles on November 15 a full-circle moment. The star visited the massive mall’s JCPenney, where she promoted Mystic Canyon and was accompanied by her longtime glam team Ken Pavés and Joyce Bonelli.
But Simpson’s early aromatic influences weren’t limited only to shopping destinations.
“I can smell my Nana making pralines,” Simpson said of her most impactful scent memories. “That’s a big thing, or my nanny, my dad’s mom, making fudge or coconut cream pie. In Texas for sure, with all the seasons, I feel like memory scents are so interesting. They trigger feelings, you know? My Nana made the best hot rolls, and she passed and didn’t leave the recipe behind. None of us can do it, so we’ll never smell that again.”
When it came to the influence behind her latest development—distributed by Parlux Ltd, the entity behind Eilish Fragrances, Paris Hilton Fragrances and Drake’s Better World Fragrance House—Simpson tapped into her newly minted single status.
“I keep the guys in mind,” said the entrepreneur, whose split from Eric Johnson was announced in January after 10 years of marriage. “I keep the dates in mind. You want a good first impression. You want them to want to smell you. You want them to want to have your shampoo in their shower. You want them to reminisce about you. And I feel like this perfume is reminiscent of a familiar romantic feeling.”
Timing is everything, and this scent speaks to where Simpson is currently in her life.
“There’s personality in fragrance, and it depends on what time of year it is,” she said. “It depends on what you’re going through in your life. Certain things just feel right, you know?”
A Deep Understanding Of Fragrance
If there’s one takeaway from this interview with Simpson, she’s not one to simply slap her name onto something personal. She demonstrates an advanced understanding of aromas, notes, how to keep costs down without diluting the scent, and what will appeal to the masses.
“I wanted to give people a fragrance they could trust,” she said. “What elevates it is probably the floral, but it’s also the depth of the aroma and the scent. It’s about whether it can captivate your senses. So it would be something grounding like cedarwood. Oak moss is what we use. We’re grounding in our bottom notes. I like amber, and I always like vanilla, but specifically vanilla bean. There are different kinds. There’s a more powdery vanilla, which I don’t think a lot of people love, but vanilla bean is different.”
When asked how she keeps perfume costs down while still offering an alluring scent, she explained without hesitation: “Well, there’s a difference between tuberose or Turkish rose, for example. Some roses are really intense and some other florals like gardenias are really intense. For me, I like jasmine and I like iris, but it has to be creamy. It has to have warmth to it.”
Ultimately, Mystic Canyon is a strong representation of the star: “I feel like it’s elevated in its own way of not being too fancy,” Simpson said. “It definitely has a lot more of me in it than any of my other scents.”