“This is the first scent I ever made,” model and brand founder Bella Hadid tells me over Zoom. Seconds before I clicked “join meeting,” I had doused myself in Nightcap, the fourth fragrance from Hadid’s Orebella, which launched in May of this year. Wait—had the vibe in this LED-light drenched conference room suddenly become sort of sexy?
Each of Orebella’s scents are “pieces of my soul,” Hadid shares (look to Salted Muse, which is inspired by her Palestinian heritage), and this Nightcap is references her life pre-world domination. “Nightcap is an ode to that nostalgic vanilla scent we all smelled in girl’s locker room in high school. It was a little overwhelming, but so delicious, but so sweet.” The vanilla-heavy scent is spiked with ginger and cardamom, making it a bit pastry-like, a bit cocktail-y.
Hadid is also a well-documented horse girl—during that youthful time of vanilla-spritzing, she was show jumping with a gorgeous dark bay. “In high school I met my soul horse, and his name was Nightcap.” And while the scent isn’t about the Nightcap per se (no notes of hay or manure here), it honors the power and confidence the two felt together.
“It’s about being strong but sweet,” she says. “I learned that from Nightcap, and the love I had for riding and the animal. But I also learned that from school, all of the trials and tribulations of it.”