If you’ve ever lusted after a liquid hand soap and wondered if perhaps you’d lost your marbles, you can thank (or blame) Núria Cruelles. The perfumer at Loewe, working with the designer Jonathan Anderson (who recently left to become the creative director of Dior), came up with the Tomato Leaves soap and set off a frenzy of desire. At the Jenna Perry salon, where highlights can cost $650, the bottle in the restroom is filched regularly. Loewe’s other soaps, candles, body lotions, and room sprays in Oregano, Marihuana, Ivy, and more are equally unexpected and captivating. Cruelles, who works in Madrid, draws on her love of everyday odors from nature. “Architects like Gaudí were inspired by nature to make buildings,” she says. “To me, it’s like that for perfumes.”
WHY DID TOMATO LEAVES CAPTURE PEOPLE’S IMAGINATION?
Sometimes you smell something, and it smells inspired of, but it’s not real. I worked with Jonathan [Anderson] on a combination of dreaming and reality. And it wasn’t expected. When I described this smell, people said, Really, are you sure? You have this greenness and the pulp of the tomato, the fruitiness, the little bit of sweetness. We did the candle first, and when we created the body care, I reformulated it a little because I thought it would be too much for the skin. We launched just after the pandemic when people wanted to feel nature, to breathe, to fly.
