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To me, the most perfect scent in the world is a bar of Ivory soap: crisp, clean, snowy white. And I’m not alone—Bobbi Brownagrees! When she was at the helm of her eponymous brand Bobbi Brown, she released a fragrance called Bath that was inspired by the iconic soap. Bath was eventually discontinued, but I’ve been chasing that Ivory inspo for years. Sometimes you just wanna smell clean, you know? 

Now that Brown is back in beauty with her brand Jones Road, she’s also revisiting the fragrance world with a new scent called Shower. You know how good you feel when you’re fresh out of the shower, all sparkling clean and warm, skin delicately scented with whatever bar soap or body wash you sudsed up with? That’s the feeling Brown and her team were trying to capture with Shower. 

Ahead, everything you need to know about the brand’s first fragrance, plus my honest review.

The Fragrance

Shower was formulated to be an easy, simple, classically clean scent, in fitting with Jones Road’s entire ethos as a brand. The line itself was built around versatile, easygoing, effortless products you can (and should) apply with your fingers, and Shower has a similar function from a fragrance POV. It’s built around neroli and orange blossom notes with a splash of sea spray, so it feels less like indulging your senses with a Sol de Janeiro body wash and matching body butter and more like scrubbing down in the shower after a long day soaking up the sun on the beach. In true Bobbi Brown fashion, it’s light, fresh, beachy and never “too much,” always just enough. 

My Review

Despite the fact that my fragrance tastes tend to run to spicy patchouli roses like Frederic Malle’s Portrait of a Lady, modern chypres like Le Labo’s Ylang 49, and classic sparkling aldehydes like Chanel No. 5 and Amouage Gold Woman, I really do think a bar of Ivory soap is the chicest thing on the planet, and I’ve been chasing a similar fragrance for months. I tried Demeter’s Pure Soap roll on oil, which was nice but definitely more Dove than Ivory; Lorenzo Villoresi Firenze Teint de Neige, which is powdery, soft and soapy but not Ivory crisp; and even Dior’s Pure Poison, which opens with a bubbly, soapy top note. None quite fit what I was craving, so I was extremely excited about Shower.

Spoiler alert: Shower is not the Ivory soap fragrance of my dreams, but it does give off that same freshly scrubbed, clean-but-not cloying vibe. (Don’t even get me started on scents that smell like laundry soap—please no.) The orange blossom and neroli notes, which are frequently used in “clean” scents, are most prevalent and they’re perfectly lovely, but what I like most is the slight metallic zing you get as the fragrance softens. It’s not the salty sea spray, which is lightly woven in, but it’s definitely there—similar to leaving a bar of wet soap on the shelf of the shower and that stainless steel scent blending into the suds left behind.

Shower is a fragrance for when you just want to smell good—not complex, not heavy, not loud and lingering. Just nice. Brown previously said she likes using it to freshen up on a super hot day, and I can confirm that it certainly does make you feel clean on a randomly sticky, sweaty, 88-degree day in October, but it would be a lovely way to lighten up on a cold winter day. 

Shower doesn’t have intense lasting power, but that can be solved with some clever layering. The simple formula lends itself well to mixing and matching with other scents, and I’ve been pairing it with a “Rain” fragrance oil with notes of muguet and woods. The scent won’t replace the invigorating, revitalizing feeling of your weekly “everything shower,” but it’s a light and lovely way to freshen up fast.