To prepare Jesus’s body on the day of his burial, Mary Magdalene anointed his feet with spikenard oil. The prized oil was an expensive luxury in those days, and the act caused shock and outrage. “Everyone said ‘she’s mad, we knew that she was mad, she’s pouring all this money, this really expensive, luxurious substance all over Jesus’s feet, she’s clearly a crazy woman,’” says FKA twigs. “So she took down her hair and she started mopping up the drops of spikenard that were falling off Jesus’s feet with her hair.”
Spikenard, along with other herbs and oils used by Mary Magdalene to heal people, makes up the juice of twigs’ fragrance Magdalene, named for the saint. Created during the making of her critically acclaimed album of the same name, the scent was a vital part of her creative process and embodies the ideas she was exploring at the time – ideas around how women’s stories have forever been twisted and rewritten, and how society is obsessed with boxing women into the archetypes of virgin or whore. This fragrance was a way for twigs to bring the two sides of herself together.
“There’s the whore, the temptress, the mistress, the sex worker, the scarlet woman, and then there’s the Virgin. The sweet, the good, the innocent, the pure. I’m both, you know. When I’m at my most powerful, I’m both,” she says. “For me, that archetype of the virgin/ whore is where the fragrance came from. To me, it’s both a first kiss and a good fuck.”
Magdalene was originally intended as a personal project, a tool to evoke the right mood and atmosphere in which to create the album. However, after seeing the impact the music had on people and the personal connection they felt to it, twigs decided to share it with her fans through her mailing list. The first launch sold out in under 24 hours. “I had to actually hold bottles back! I just wasn’t expecting it. They all sold out and I was like, ‘Whoa, okay, I need to give a couple to my mum and my friends,” she says, laughing. Here, Dazed speaks to twigs about the story behind the scent.
How did this start? Do you always make scents when you’re creating?
FKA twigs: I’ve always been really obsessed with smelling good. When I was young, I would layer my fragrances with things that I liked, a body butter or an oil. It’s definitely a big part of who I am. I met Christi [Meshell] from the House of Matriarch in 2016. She came onto my tour bus with bells around her hips, playing amazing spiritual music, and I was like, ‘wow, who’s this? This woman is everything’. She’d made a fragrance for me. She said that usually she makes fragrances and can connect with the spirits of dead artists, she can channel what she thinks they would smell like. I was the first [living] artist that she’d done. She said that my spirit was so potent that she was able to do it when I was alive. And then I smelled the fragrance, it hit me, and it smelled like me. I can’t explain it.
From then, we developed a friendship that lasted many years and we’ve both really taken our time on this collaboration. When I was doing [the album] Magdalene, it was such a visceral experience for me with where I was emotionally and all the things that were going on in my life. I felt like I was growing into myself. Christi came to LA to see me, and we spent the evening together opening up all of our oils. We were in the bedroom, and the moon was shining through these big windows. We had all of the oils and fragrances and herbs out on the floor and we stayed up all night. And we made Magdalene [the scent] together.
The album and the perfume are inspired by Mary Magdalene. When did you first relate to her story and think you wanted to create something around that?
FKA twigs: When I was younger I went to Sunday school. I found it really fascinating how my Sunday School teacher would always talk a lot about Jesus, the other disciples and Mary, Jesus’s mother. I was really interested in Mary Magdalene, though. I’d ask ‘Oh what about her?’ And they’d just tell me ‘She was a prostitute and Jesus was nice to everyone, that’s why he’s such a good person.’ I became fascinated with the way that women are portrayed throughout history. Then, in my own much smaller way, becoming an artist and being in the public eye, I became fascinated by how my history was being written, wrongly. How after 10 years of being in the industry, my legacy is completely twisted. No one really at all knows who I am.
Mary Magdalene is one of the earliest archetypes of the Scarlet Woman, the Dangerous Woman, the temptress, the sex worker, the whore. I wondered how wrong everyone was about her story. So I started to do some research into it and it turns out that she funded a lot of Jesus’s missions. She was a healer herself and Jesus would go off and heal people but she had a bag of tricks. She was known for having so many oils, she would heal with oils and herbs and tinctures.
There are different versions of her tale, but one that makes the most sense to me logically is that she was probably the partner of Jesus romantically and they may have had children together. If they were descendants of Christ, the whole religion of Christianity would essentially implode. So by calling her a whore and a prostitute, it means that any children that she has can’t be proven. So it’s a way to focus the energy on Jesus and all the brilliant things that he did, and push her into the shadows. That’s what originally drew me to want to explore who she was and the tales of women in general and how our legacies can often be twisted.
“As humans we have a desire to smell something that’s a bit nasty, you want to go back to it” – FKA twigs
You said something the other day that I loved, which is when the two archetypes – the virgin and the whore – come together, that’s when women are at their most powerful.
FKA twigs: Yeah, definitely. I think society has an obsession with separating the two. I’m both. But, from my experience of my life, I have to fight to be both. And each time I think I've landed there, and I’m being both, you can get knocked off. People will try to push you into one or the other. I think that the most healthy relationships I’ve had are when I’ve been allowed to be both. My most unhealthy is when I’ve had a partner try to force me to be one. ‘Don’t go out wearing that. Don’t look at that person.’ Or when they have tried to oversexualize me and try to force me into another box. That’s when I feel completely uncentered and lost, and I don’t feel like I’m harnessing my true energy.
So that archetype of the virgin/ whore is where the fragrance came from. To me, it’s both a first kiss and a good fuck. It’s sweet and there is an innocence and it’s intoxicating – you want more of it. But then at the same time, it’s very grounded with the wood and the incense. It creates this all-knowing sensuality.
You were saying that the oils that you use in the fragrance are some of the ones that Mary Magdalene used.
FKA twigs: We went through a lot of the religious paintings of her and different pictures and stories and writings about her and there was rose, balsam, wood, incense and spikenard. Spikenard is really interesting because it’s quite a horrible smell in a way, kind of bitter. I think as humans we have a desire to smell something that’s a bit nasty, you want to go back to it. So often in fragrances when there’s a tiny hint of that earthy humaneness it makes it really addictive and then offset with the rose and the wood and incense. It’s just very addictive.
It’s funny because it almost feels weird talking about it as a fragrance. To me, it’s a ritual or it’s a mood. I use fragrance a lot as a tool. For me, Magdalene is a tool, it’s a tool that I used to finish my album. It’s the tool that I used to go on tour. It’s a tool that I used to bring together my virgin/ whore.
When you were creating the scent were you already thinking it was something that you’d want to share with people? Or did that come later?
FKA twigs: No, that came much later. When I made Magdalene I didn’t realise how people were really going to connect with it, it was such a personal project. I can now really see the impact that it’s had on people’s love journeys and self journeys. I think it’s the piece of work to date that’s had [the biggest] personal impact on people so for me to be able to share Magdalene is part of keeping that story alive. It’s forever imprinted, the woman that I was that made that is imprinted now in a fragrance. Smell evokes so much, doesn’t it?
How does it feel to smell such a personal scent on other people? Is it weird for you?
FKA twigs: No, because I think that fragrances always smell so different on different people, you add your own part of the story into the fragrance. But I feel ready to share it now as well, it’s been a couple of years. I think if I was in the process, it’d be weird. If I was dancing up the pole and everyone was wearing it! But now, for me, it’s a pleasure to be able to share it. It’s taken four or five years to be in the right place emotionally to give it away, to find the right way to get it out there and into the world that feels delicate and beautiful.
Is fragrance something you want to do more of? Do you think you’ll do new ones for each new project?
FKA twigs: Definitely! I might have a couple more tucked up my sleeve already.
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