Jane Seymour's New His-and-Hers Fragrances Won't 'Make People Want You to Leave the Elevator'
Leave it to Jane Seymour to always have our backs when it comes to genius Mother’s Day gifts. If you surprised your mom with a piece of jewelry from Seymour’s Open Heart Collection last year, the actress and designer has you covered this year too (all the way through Father’s Day) with her new fragrance collection, Her Open Heart and His Open Heart.
We caught up with Seymour to learn more about what inspired the scents of her new fragrances and found out it’s all rooted in the idea of family and home. “The perfume house came to my home [in Malibu] and we wanted to create something that was completely authentic,” Seymour tells PeopleStyle. “We took all the smells in the garden - and I have everything from giant red woods, to very aromatic roses, and gardenias, and scented flowers, and lavender, and fruit trees and the smell of the ocean - you name it and it’s all there.”
The women’s scent has “more floral with peonies in it, while the man’s has lavender and the smell of the ocean,” Seymour explains.
While heavy with influences from her garden, both fragrances are very subtle; as Seymour puts it, they “don’t hit you over the head or make people want you to leave the elevator.”
While the male and female scents were designed to be worn separately, throughout testing she noticed women gravitated toward both. “The interesting thing is when we had people try them I myself feel this way the men’s fragrance I like to wear just as much as the woman’s fragrance. I think a lot of woman are going to end up stealing some from the men.”
One reason she was so happy to get into the fragrance business again (she was in the campaign for Le Jardin de Max Factor in 1984 and the Midsummer Night’s Dream-based set is something you need to see) is because she had a hand in designing it and it connects to a deep childhood memory.
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Her love (and knack) for fragrance came from her mother, who had her own line of scented products. “My mother before World War II had a line of body lotions and face creams and fragrances, Miss Lavender,” Seymour recalls. “She lived in the middle of Indonesia near a tea plantation and of course it was a very fragrant atmsophere there. They had lavender so she created these potions. And when the war broke out and she was incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp for three and a half years, the one thing she managed to take into the camp was a book of all her recipes.”
Throughout Seymour’s childhood, her mother continued gardening and passed down her love of fragrances. “We had a garden with lavender in it and when I was a little girl I used to make lavender water and lavender sashets. And it was all about making our own fragrances. That was one of our favorite things to do.”
She continued her mother’s legacy by creating scents with hints of that signature ingredient, and by designing the bottles to reflect her “open hearts” mantra. “The packaging on the bottle represents how my mother lived her life,” says Seymour. “The philopshy behind the open heart and the artwork on the bottle is all about living with an open heart. So as much as anything this really represents a universal symbol of giving and receiving love. If you close your heart off you can’t receive, you can’t give. If you have an open heart you can meet the challenges, move forward in life, grow and connect with people.”
The two fragrances will be available on HSN starting May 1 and Seymour will be making a special live appearance on May 1 to kick off the launch. And they won’t only make ideal Mother’s Day and Father’s Day presents (3.4 ounces with velvet jewelry wrap starts at $59.90), but your purchase also helps a worthy cause.
A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Open Hearts Foundation. “What we do at the Open Hearts Foundation is incubate charities that people may not have heard of that are extraordinary that we vet and discover,” Seymour explains. “And they inevitably are created by someone who’s gone through a particular challenge or who support someone who’s gone through a particular challenge.”
Are you doing your Mother’s Day and Father’s Day shopping on HSN now?
