The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
In 2018, Raf Simons arrived at Calvin Klein as Chief Creative Officer and began reimagining everything. Calvin Klein Women was his first fragrance for the house, a deliberate statement that the brand could still make something worth paying attention to. Simons found his concept not in a perfume library but in his photography habit: images of women, their gazes, the particular power in a held expression. He called the campaign 'I Am Women,' assembling Oscar winners Lupita Nyong'o and Saoirse Ronan alongside the women they personally admired, Eartha Kitt and Katharine Hepburn for Nyong'o, Nina Simone and Sissy Spacek for Ronan. Perfumers Honorine Blanc and Annick Ménardo were tasked with distilling that ambition into liquid. The brief wasn't floral sweetness. It was contrast, infinitely varied and deeply complex, the house said, like the women who inspired it.
The Nootka cypress in the base is unusual. Most mass-market fragrances rely on cedar or cashmeran for their woody drydown, safe materials that read clean without demanding anything. Nootka cypress, a slow-growing conifer from the Pacific Northwest, carries a different weight: resinous, almost medicinal, with a faint camphor edge that keeps the scent from settling into predictable softness. Eucalyptus acorn as a top note is equally uncommon, most fragrances use eucalyptus in supporting roles, not as the opening act. Here it anchors the composition in something sharp, green, and just slightly bitter.
The evolution
The opening hits immediately. Eucalyptus and black pepper arrive sharp, clearing the air, there's no gentle transition here, just the scent of a room that just got occupied. Citrus hangs briefly in the background, giving the eucalyptus something to cut against, but the green note dominates the first twenty minutes. Then the orange blossom arrives. It shifts the register from sharp mineral to something cleaner, almost clinical. The jasmine absolute and magnolia follow, building a white floral heart that reads soapy rather than sweet. This is the fragrance's longest phase, roughly three to four hours of that aldehydic floral cleanliness, with ambroxan and cashmeran slowly entering the conversation. The cedar from Alaska arrives around hour four, grounding everything in something dry and slightly resinous. White musk and cashmeran keep it intimate, the sillage never really projects beyond arm's length after the first hour. By hour six, you're left with that Nootka cypress-resinous drydown, a quiet whisper of what started as cold air and sharp intent.
Cultural impact
Calvin Klein Women arrived during a cultural moment when 'women' as a word was already contested territory, a statement of identity and defiance wearing perfume. The campaign featured Lupita Nyong'o and Saoirse Ronan alongside their personal heroines: Katharine Hepburn, Eartha Kitt, Nina Simone, Sissy Spacek. Women who were known for something beyond their faces. Perfumers Honorine Blanc and Annick Ménardo built a fragrance that didn't negotiate, it opens sharp and stays itself. The soapiness polarizes. Some find it hotel-clean, the kind of scent that fills a room without asking permission. Others find it medicinal, the eucalyptus too green for comfort.
