Sarah Jessica Parker Smells Phenomenal—And Here’s Why

It is easy to tell when Sarah Jessica Parker—a woman known by just about anyone for her generation-defining role as Carrie Bradshaw—is in a room. Even if you had, say, managed to survive under a proverbial rock large enough to eclipse the cultural importance of Sex and the City, you’d be hard-pressed not to recognize the tousled blonde lengths, the exuberant smile, the piercing blue eyes of America’s sweetheart—or the familiar sight of her 5’3” whip-thin frame as it streaks across a floor on vertiginous heels with the ease of a seasoned marathon runner in sneakers. The more advanced task is to know when Sarah Jessica Parker has been in a room—one requires a certain nose for it. As those closest to her can confirm, Parker is instantly recognizable by the particular sillage that lingers in an elevator, cab, or hallway long after she’s departed.

“I wear fragrance all. Day. Long.” she says with characteristically emphatic delivery. “It’s probably the area in which I’m most egregious in my total decadence. I don’t limit myself.” She isn’t kidding. In fact, Parker is so passionate about it that, in 2005, she created her own signature scent—the best-selling lavender, amber, and orchid-based Lovely. Then came the bright and spicy Covet and the sweetly citrus SJP NYC. Now, she’s adding Stash SJP, a smoky vetiver- and musk-spiked unisex blend that has taken 10 years to perfect, to the lineup. While demonstrating her daily application, she spritzes Stash on this writer’s wrists, then neck, then coat, and goes in for one more above-the-head mist with wild abandon for good measure. The aura of patchouli, black pepper, and ginger lily notes, she admits, cloaks all of her belongings. “It’s on everything: my coats, my hats, my horrible winter parka gets its own force field of it,” she says of the seasonal uniform she’s often photographed in on her walks to drop off her children—James Wilkie, 13, and twins Marion Loretta and Tabitha, 7—at school.

On this particular crisp day in New York City, dressed in a simple crew-cut gray sweater and skinny jeans, Parker is taking a break between filming her new HBO series, Divorce, and designing a wardrobe’s worth of shoes for her SJP by Sarah Jessica Parker collection, to shoot the campaign for Stash. “It’s almost like passing along something illegal,” she jokes of the cultish fragrance, named for the response it garnered in everyone from a Senegalese cab driver to the hostess at a local restaurant and her cadre of close friends, all of whom have been trying to get their hands on it since she started brewing it. “They’ll say, ‘What are you wearing? Can we get that?’” Fittingly, the clean glass bottle arrives labeled with a piece of black gaffer tape to give the effect of personal contraband.

In fact, Parker has cultivated an entire arsenal of treasured beauty goods—like the Laura Mercier Caviar Stick she’s currently wearing in a shimmering shade of green. “It’s the greatest eye pencil ever in the history of eye pencils,” she says, citing its ability to smudge freely and then miraculously stay put. Parker keeps an entire stock of shades including Jungle, Tuxedo, Khaki, Smoke, and Plum, at her disposal to dial up the smolder everywhere from the sidewalk to the red carpet. “I wear it every day of my life,” says Parker, chronicling the moment she fell in love with the look while watching Lisa Bonet on Letterman years ago. “She didn’t have a smoky eye, but she did have a natural really low shadow that was this beautiful plum,” before going on to wax poetic about the exact “lavender, pink, and heliotrope” tone of Bonet’s uncovered dark circles. “I love dark circles—any movie with a woman with dark circles, I just think, ohhh,” she says, letting her eyes roll toward the ceiling in elation.

Off set, you will not find Parker in concealer. “I always feel like a fraud,” she says. Instead, her daily ritual consists of Dior Addict lip gloss, the aforementioned swipe of Mercier’s Caviar Stick, and upwards of five spritzes of her fragrance before she’s out the door. Hair gets tossed into one of two looks: a bun or a ponytail. “I never brush my hair unless I have to, ever. It’s ratty and nasty and slept-on and I dig it.” And, she adds, “I don’t wear extensions. It just really embarrasses me—what if someone hugs you?” Instead, she tosses her head over and douses her head in sprays of Serge Normant’s Dream Big volumizing spray. “It’s like scar tissue,” she jokes of the product’s ability to create an otherworldly scaffolding for her hair. “It’s the greatest friggin’ thing.”

The pared-down routine allows Parker a few more precious uninterrupted moments in the morning. “I’m up before anybody else in the house is up with the most brutal black strong coffee you’ve ever imagined. One cup in the morning is like everything to me. I think about it the night before.” That being said, you won’t find her leaping out of bed in the name of fitness. “I used to read that Demi Moore would get up [and] work out for two hours and then she’d go shoot. That’s so wonderful, but it’s just a quality I don’t possess.” Instead, she earns her muscle tone by taking the city she loves by foot, walking everywhere. So, if you happen to turn a corner onto a certain block of the West Village in the early morning hours and catch a hint of cedarwood or sage in the air, Sarah Jessica Parker has probably just been there. Or maybe it was a Senegalese cab driver, or a restaurant hostess, or one of her close friends.

 

 

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