Phlur Fragrance Founder Chriselle Lim on How-To Make Your Perfume Last Longer, Her Favourite K-Beauty Skincare Steal and Plastic Surgery Realness

0:00The following podcast is a dear media production.

0:07Welcome to Breaking Beauty, the podcast all about the breakthrough people, products, and moments in beauty. We're your hosts, Jill Dunn and Carlene Higgins.

0:20Welcome back to Breaking Beauty podcast, everyone. It's Carlene and Jill right in your feeds. We are the beauty editors turned beauty podcasters. What's up, Jill? Hey, Carlene. And thanks to everyone for joining us. I feel like we might have some new peeps tuning in who discovered our podcast via our chat with Amy Koberling, aka the hashtag skin enthusiast last week. We had so much fun chatting with Amy on her show, all about trends and industry news. And we don't often get a chance to flex that muscle. So I was really thrilled to be able to do it. And of course, Amy was on our show last week, so where she shared so much with us.

0:58And of course, Carleen, we're two longtime beauty editors, came from the magazine world, and we're beauty podcasters now. And each and every week, we're chatting with the Breakthrough People, Products, and Moments in Beauty. And we have an archive of 350 episodes at this point. And some incredible guests have included Haley Bieber and Tracee Ellis Ross, Huda Katan, Makeup by Mario, Jen Atkin. And we always love talking also with people who are changing the beauty game. And that certainly applies to our guest today. Yes, we were so fortunate to sit down in Toronto with Chriselle Lim, longtime fashion content creator.

1:36She's just so stylish, so beautiful. And she was in town with Sephora, I believe, for her fragrance brand, Flour, which has absolutely exploded. It's P-H-L-U-R. And I just feel like it's doing so well. And to be honest with you, Jill, I hadn't had a chance to smell it until we got to sit down with her and they sent us the products. And I I'm honestly so impressed. I just think this beautiful second skin like musk effect. And so I'm not surprised that they've taken off. I think that move to do like a body mist, especially on the heels of the success of the Sol de Janeiro body mist. It's like this is the level up.

2:19This is like the, you know, the elevated, the aspirational version. And I think she's just killing it. I'm so happy for her. And I'm so happy we got to sit down with her. It's a fine fragrance brand, first and foremost. And she's up to like eight or nine cents at this point, which is incredible because the portfolio, she just started working on it or like they officially relaunched it in 2022 and they didn't even have a retail partner at the time. So the fact that it's all TikTok kind of moving these products and cementing them as like a brand to watch that in 2024 is incredible. And the blind buys, right?

2:54This is what we talked about in our fragrance episode where we had like seven of our favorite beauty editors on the show. We talked about the fact that, you know, DTC fragrance brands have been like blind buys. And so it really, you know, Her face, I think, and her taste level and curation is really what has gotten people to purchase. And I think that's incredibly powerful that she's made it to this point. They are in retailers now. Yeah. And they amassed a wait list of 275 ,000 people and like totally incredible. And she also has a child care startup called Bummo, which she founded with our co-founder, Joan.

3:35and that kind of reimagined the future of family and work. So I feel like it's her content and fashion and style and beauty, her content on TikTok as a mom. It's, you know, people feel like they very much know her. And I feel like we got to know her even more on a personal level in this conversation we're having today. She's been quite vulnerable with her audience when it comes to a divorce that she went through. And we're going to talk about that in today's episode and how that sort of gave birth to this 2.0 in her career and really is intertwined with the story of Fleur. We also connect on Leferoplasty, which she's been pretty open with on with her audience on social media as well.

4:18But she tells the story a little deeper. She actually mentions that she hasn't revealed this yet, why she may have some regrets, actually, in terms of her, the procedure that she had done. So yeah, we get her secrets about the fashion lines on the items she's most excited about for this fall, her beauty favorites, her top shelf. The very incredibly budget-friendly skincare product that basically was emptied. And I was shocked that it was on her top shelf. And we will be publishing this episode on our YouTube channel as well. So be sure to follow us at Breaking Beauty Podcast. And of course, subscribe over there.

5:00And we also just dropped a newsletter that's going to be going out more regularly, sometimes with our monthly favorites, sometimes with more in-depth product reviews and product info. Absolutely. And don't forget that we have a TikTok exclusive. Jill, you kind of made your way into her bathroom and just like spontaneously got out your phone camera. What was going on in there. She only had carry on her beauty stuff. And I could not believe how much stuff she had in her carry on for beauty. I was hashtag inspired with this packing. Okay. And there was stuff I had never seen before. I got the closeup shots and it was really a lot of fun.

5:40So on every level, we had such a fun conversation. Everything that we discussed today, we will link to it over on our blog, which is breakingbeautypodcast.com. You can find it there, all the info from our shows. and without further ado, welcome Chriselle Lim.

6:02Grateful that The Way is supporting our show this week. So here's a little behind the scenes. Today was my day to do my everything shower routine. And when I was looking around my shower, I realized how many of The Way's products have just sort of crept into being my shower staples. Like I am obsessed. My number one favorite product from them is the way detox shampoo. I love how deeply it cleanses my oily scalp, but it never makes my hair feel stripped at all. My hair is softer. It's shinier. I also love their hair gloss. I use that about once a week. It just gives you this high wadded shine. It's a rinse out treatment.

6:40And then I love the leave-in conditioner as well. You spray it in on wet hair and I feel like you get that heat protection and my hair is just super shiny. It feels stronger and healthier. And no matter your hair type or texture, whether you're fine, medium or thick, Whey has got you. Their shampoo and conditioner are made to deliver what's just right for your hair type. And I love that. And great news. We have a special offer just for Breaking Beauty listeners. Wash your way to healthy hair and get a hair routine that's made just for you by Whey. Go to the Whey.com. That's spelled T-H-E-O-U-A-I.com and use promo code beauty15 for 15 % off any product.

7:21That's theway.com spelled T-H-E-O-U-A-I.com and use code beauty15. We'll link to this offer in our show notes and on our website. Now back to the show. Hey friends, my name is Olivia Perez and I'm an entrepreneur, journalist, and the host of the Friend of a Friend podcast. Every Monday, I meet with some of today's youngest and brightest entrepreneurs to make spaces, how their stories and shine a light on who I believe to be the next generation of luminaries. I'll interview up-and-comers and game changers from brand builders to personalities, activists, artists, and thought leaders from around the world.

7:52Each episode lets you be a fly on the wall during one of the greatest pep talks, like a conversation between you and a friend or a friend of a friend. See you there.

8:07Welcome to Breaking Beauty Podcast, Chriselle. Thank you. I am so excited to be here. I flew in just for you guys. Thank you so much. So nice to hear it. We want to really congratulate you, first of all, because you recently received some high praise in WWD. Your fine fragrance brand, Fleur, was named one of the most powerful brands in beauty in 2024. And that's high praise. It was right up there with Say, Rode, Patrick Ta. Is it like winning an Oscar where someone wakes you up But your publicist calls you. Guess what? Honestly, it doesn't feel real. I know that it's out there and everyone has read the article and people are congratulating me.

8:51But I feel like I'm kind of floating at this point. You know, when you're in the weeds and you're working so hard building something from the ground up, it's so hard to see yourself outside of that. And so for me, I'm just like in the hustle every single day. And so to be recognized by some of these brands that I personally look up to that I really admire, it doesn't feel real. Because you're always just working ahead and on to the next thing, right? Yeah. And I think when you're in building mode and we're really in kind of growth mode right now with Fleur, is that we're continuously coming out with newness.

9:29That's something that's very important to myself and the Gen Z audience, because it's important to give them kind of a variety of things. Right. And so we're always on to the next thing so quick. Let's talk a little bit more about how you got started with Fleur, because I know you came on to give it a bit of a second life and most people do not know that. So talk to us about when it came into your life and what the journey's been like. Yeah. So Fleur came into my life at a very inconvenient time when I was actually going through my divorce. And I actually met my co-founder, Ben Bennett, who is the founder of the center.

10:11And we have a lot of mutual friends. And he was like, you know, Chriselle, I am thinking about acquiring this brand Fleur, but I want to do it with you. I think you are the perfect partner, the perfect fit for it. And I've actually heard of Fleur before. I had a few of the fragrances before and, and it was, I loved it. It sat on kind of my, I've always had a perfume wardrobe. And so it was sat on my perfume wardrobe. I've seen it and I never thought or imagined myself to be the founder of Fleur, yet alone of any fragrance brand. And so it really took me a second, actually a few weeks for it to marinate.

10:52And I told him, you know, it's not the best time right now, but let me think about it. And he said something to me one day and he was like, you know, Fleur is coming into its second life and so are you. And I think there's a lot of synergy here and a lot of storytelling that you can do. And that's when I was like, oh, Ah, okay. I think there's something that really hit me because I was in the chapter of my life where I was starting over and I wasn't really sure of the direction I wanted to go in, but I knew that I was excited and I had a lot of the stories to tell people through all the experiences that I've gone through.

11:36And so I viewed it as a way to learn from one of the top, top, not one, but a lot of top noses that I've looked up to, but also to be able to tell many different stories through scent. Yeah. Wow. And that was in 2022? Is that right? 2021. Wow. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with missing person. It's on my right. Oh, amazing. I love to hear that. I love it. So Missing Person was our very first fragrance. And the truth of that story, because some people come up to me, a lot of different brands, fragrance houses, they're like, how did you do that? What is the secret sauce to getting a scent to go that viral?

12:19But the truth is that we didn't even know if we could sell like 50 of them. Because one, no one's ever successfully sold fragrance online without smelling it at a counter or in person first. So keep in mind that when we relaunch Fleur, we were not available anywhere. So it's not like, oh, I see that Fleur has this new scent. Let me go try it out. So that being struggle one. Right. Struggle two is that we were taking kind of a new approach to fragrance. You know, here, most fragrance houses, and what I've typically bought into and learned from fragrance houses is that you paint this beautiful picture, this idea of a grand life, you know, a beautiful flower field that you're running through.

13:11You know, you're building up aspiration, right? But I said, I don't want to do that. I don't know how to do that right now. I'm in a shitty place. Am I allowed to cuss on here? Yes. I'm in a shitty place. I don't feel well. I am lonely. I am missing a piece of me that is no longer there. I can't fake that, right? I can't fake that my life is great. And I said, why don't I share this story of missing this moment in my life, missing being loved, missing being held by someone, that skin to skin intimacy. And that is what I was craving at that moment. And so that was the risk number two of, okay, I'm literally here just, telling people that I'm depressed.

14:00Right. And buy my perfume. Right. Not usually the conventional place to start. Can you be depressed but in grass? Run through some floral fields or something. And funny enough, when I started picking up on TikTok, people were calling it the sad girl fragrance, which was not intended to be that. But what I realized through Missing Person and through that experience was that everyone, we all share the same emotions. We all have different experiences. And we actually have etched on our body. I don't know if you've seen the little engraving. It says something along the lines of we all have different experiences, but share the same emotions.

14:47And that's what Fleur brings with every scent. And it brings a certain emotion out. And so when we launched Missing Person, I realized that more people felt seen than they've ever had after sharing that vulnerable story of mine. And then people started ordering, you know, we got a few hundred orders, a thousand orders, and then it started really picking up once people started receiving it. And they were experiencing of their own. if you type in missing person TikTok on TikTok, you will see thousands of videos of girls spraying it, crying, sharing their missed moment or their missed person. And it became more than a fragrance.

15:33It became therapy. It became a healing scent for so many people. And so that's how missing person was born and how it went viral is that I think it really struck a chord with so many people through that relatable emotion. I love that you called it like your version of a breakup album, which I think really kind of puts it like a point on everything you just said. For our listeners, if they haven't smelled it already, what does it smell like? What does it smell like to you personally? It smells fresh and clean. Others, it smells musky and a little bit more skin like. For me, I smell more of the muskiness.

16:11And so when we were developing this scent with our nurse Jill, I asked her, okay, how do we capture a warm hug? How do we capture as if you're like nuzzled into someone's neck, as if you're so close to someone, but it's not a projecting scent. It's an intimate scent. So it's something that only people that are very intimate with you will notice. you notice it yourself and anyone that's really intimate with you. It's not like one of those scents where you walk in and you smell it. And so for me personally, whenever I spray it, I actually was spraying missing person at night a lot before I went to bed because I was so lonely during that period.

16:55And as we were developing it, I really wanted to feel like, and this sounds kind of strange, but I was married for around eight years and I was with this person for about a total of 15 years. So the hardest part for me personally during that breakup and like that transition period was that emptiness, that emptiness of like no one being next to you, that empty bed. And so I sprayed it at night all around my bed sheets, my pillow sheets. And I wanted to smell like there was somebody there, which sounds so creepy. But that is what I get is I smell the muskiness of someone's skin, but not in like a dirty way, in a very clean, fresh, fresh way.

17:41Yeah. So let's talk about like some of the feedback that you've gotten. were there any particularly wilds like DMs you got people were complimenting the fragrance but you were like well I didn't anticipate people sharing this much about it was there something that really stands out or what compliment have you personally gotten the name is a little I guess unexpected right and so if you don't know the backstory of what where missing person comes from and kind of the narrative behind that then you could quickly easily judge and be like what kind of name is that right that's so insensitive or whatnot so we were getting a few of those oh right oh i see yeah yeah but for the most part it was very positive overwhelmingly positive to the point where like even my friend and you know because i i have a lot of our she has a lot of posh friends okay yeah i have posh friends that can afford very nice things but their go-to signature set now, not now, but like back then when we first launched it, it was missing person.

18:46And some of them it still is. And I'm like, you could pick any scent out there. I'm not even pushing my product on you. And that's when I know like it's good. Right. Yeah. When my compliment. And so is missing person the bestseller now or has something else risen to be bestseller status? Missing person is still our top three. But we recently had another viral moment, which actually is an interesting story because again, not planned. But we launched body mist. We launched body mist as a different category than our Eau Day perfumes. And we launched with three scents, which was Amber Haze, Vanilla Skin and Mango Mood.

19:30They all did very well, but there was one that went incredibly viral, which was vanilla skin. I was going to say, is it vanilla skin? Which makes sense. You're wearing on my left arm. You are? I'm wearing vanilla skin. But not the, just, I'm just wearing the perfume. The perfume. Not the mist. Not the mist, yeah. So it really took off again on TikTok. I think it was a different category for us. It was a younger consumer. I think Body Mist has been an interesting experiment for us because, again, it's a different consumer that wants Body Mist versus a fine fragrance. And so that really took off on TikTok.

20:10And so what we were seeing a lot was make this into a fine fragrance, please. And so we actually turned the Body Mist, Vanilla Skin Body Mist, into an Eau de Perfume. And we're starting to like build out the skin family because the skins, even though missing person isn't labeled with skin on the title, on the name, it is a skin mask. And I think that is when you think of Fleur, that's what you really think of is something that is very intimate and close. So any of our skins really take off. So once we launched Vanilla Skin, we just recently launched Coconut Skin, Caramel Skin, and then Heavy Cream, which is kind of a separate category of just gourmands.

20:55But yeah, it's been pretty wild just to see the growth of our Body Mist category and Vanilla Skin just as a fragrance in itself. And I think what, because we're trying to figure out why, because there's plenty of vanilla fragrances out there, lots of wonderful ones out there. And we're trying to figure out why this one really hit to the audience. And I think typically with vanilla, you think you kind of have an idea because it is a classic traditional note. So you kind of have an idea of how it would smell. But it's a very grown, lived in, sexy, mature vanilla. It's not too cute. It's not too cupcake-y.

21:35It's not too sweet. Again, it's that ending skin musk. It's that woodiness, that dry down. We call that the Flour formula. It's like we always open it with kind of this sweet, bright note. And then it kind of warms down into more of like a musky note. Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

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25:27Now back to the show.