When a Fragrance Launch Becomes a Cultural Moment

There’s nothing ordinary about Rare Beauty’s debut fragrance, Rare Eau de Parfum, and the launch made sure you felt that from the first inhale.

In a beauty landscape overflowing with celebrity scents, Rare Beauty is reshaping what a launch looks like. The fragrance itself is deeply personal, layered, nostalgic, and warm, and so was the rollout. From the packaging to the marketing touchpoints, this was storytelling designed to be felt.

To tease the scent before it even hit shelves, Rare Beauty turned NYC streets into a scratch-and-sniff playground. Walk past a billboard, smell the fragrance in real life, scan a QR code, and if you're close enough, a sample lands at your door. Miss the location by even a few blocks? No sample. It was geo-gated marketing with just the right hint of exclusivity and a whole lot of buzz.

The product broke new ground in how fragrance is worn. Instead of just one scent, Rare launched a customizable system: the Eau de Parfum paired with four scent-enhancing balms. Each balm is designed to shift or amplify the base fragrance, letting wearers adjust tone, depth, and mood in real time. It’s fragrance as a personal ritual, not a fixed identity. That spirit of inclusivity carried through to the design itself, with a bottle created alongside hand therapists to support users with limited dexterity.

The launch event, designed by Gradient, had to match the product’s emotional depth. The creative direction transformed scent into space: a glowing memory tunnel, a chandelier made of fragrance bottles, and wheatpaste walls that invited guests to leave their mark on the story.. Every detail was designed to turn personal memory into collective experience.

Even product trial was reimagined. Attendees explored “Rare Frequencies” and custom scent stations, and for content capture, the event introduced a glambot with a twist. Rather than the standard stand-and-pose, this aerial version gave each shot a cinematic sweep, pulling guests into the Rare Memories narrative. The effect was less about documentation and more about immersion—guests didn’t just pose, they performed. Spraying, opening, and interacting with the fragrance, they felt like active participants in the campaign itself.

That energy carried into amplification. With glambot footage, UGC walls, and custom captures, every interaction was designed to ripple outward online; and it did, with 1.6B+ potential impressions and over $83M in earned media value.

Rare didn’t launch a fragrance. They launched a feeling. And in doing so, they raised the bar for what beauty brands and brand experiences can be.