All in the family. Jane Seymour’s new scent isn’t your typical celebrity fragrance. The actress’ Open Hearts Fragrance started its journey in the jungle of Indonesia and made its way through three Japanese internment camps throughout Indonesia and Southeast Asia. “My mother is the inspiration for my Open Hearts Foundation and also has influenced this fragrance,” the Wedding Crashers actress tells Us Weekly. “My mother lived out in the middle of the jungle and there are so many fragrances out there, so she decided to make body lotions, shampoos, oils. She had a shop called Miss Lavender.”
Seymour’s mother faced more than her fair share of obstacles trying to preserve her work. “My mother actually came out of the Japanese internment camp with the original book with all her information on Miss Lavender,” The Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman alum shares. “How she managed to do that after being in three different camps, I don’t know.” Seymour still has the book today. “That book is truly a treasured possession. I actually have all the beautiful recipes and beautiful little hand-painted pictures, all her logos, everything. It’s pretty magical.”
Now Seymour is taking up her mother’s passion in her own way with two new scents.“ I created these scents from all the smells from the garden around my house. My garden is such an important place for me.” she explains. “I have, of course, lots of lavender, bananas, apples, peaches, strawberries, blackberries, every kind of fragrant old English rose, jasmine and gardenia.”
Seymour is also passing down her mother’s legacy to her grandchildren, her mother’s great-grandchildren. “This is now four generations of making perfume,” the Emmy-award-winning actress gushes. “I got my grandkids into it the other day and they just got completely addicted to it, like I did when I was younger. We picked lavender blossoms, we picked some rose blossoms, then we started grinding them up in some water, and my little 4-year-old granddaughter, Willa, said,’I can give this to my friends.’ She loves it.”
So what does the product of Seymour’s family legacy smell like? “My women’s scent is definitely feminine, but not sickly sweet, and has notes of pear, osmanthus, pink peony, vanilla orchid, cashmere woods and soft suede,” the former Bond girl continues. “The men’s scent is made to complement the women’s. I hate when two scents are competing with each other, so I wanted to make scents that would complement each other. Because to me, the fragrance has to be something that enhances who you are and doesn’t overpower the person next to you, a lot of women actually tell me they prefer the more masculine scent — it’s very woodsy and aqueous and reminds me of walking through a garden by the ocean.”
Seymour will be debuting the collection on HSN Monday, May 1. A portion of the proceeds will go to her Open Heart Foundation, which was created in honor of her mother. “What we do with our foundation is, we’re incubating small charities, which have been put together by people who have been through troubled times. It’s kind of like a universal symbol of giving and receiving love,” she explains.
