Written by Laura Regensdorf

Francisco Costa knows how to dress the body. As the creative director of Calvin Klein Collection’s womenswear for 13 years, he brought an eye for elevated materials to the house’s minimalist codes. In 2019, his focus shifted closer to skin with the launch of Costa Brazil, whose face and body products showcase thoughtfully sourced botanicals from the Amazon. The brand’s fragrance, transfixing and earthy, might be the truest bridge between the natural world and the personal sphere. Here, Costa shares how Aroma came to life.

THE SCENE

In the summer of 2016, Francisco Costa found himself in his mother country of Brazil, helping with the opening ceremony for the Paralympics. “I had just left Calvin and was looking for an experience—a way to break out of normalcy,” he says. After a planned trip to the Amazon fell through, Costa decided to make his own way: “I packed my backpack, and I hired a photographer to come with me.” In the midst of a five-hour canoe ride with their guide, the auxiliary propeller, strapped on with a piece of leather, dropped into the river—seemingly a lost cause that foretold a long paddle ahead. Out of the blue, a man in a passing boat fished it out of the water. “He had on an Iron Maiden T-shirt, which I remember like it was yesterday,” Costa says of this miracle worker. “That set the mood for what was coming.” 

Costa’s group arrived at the village of the Yawanawá people, with huts stationed around a central meeting ground. “There was always fire,” he says, “and I came to realize that the smokiness, with this eccentric, beautiful aroma, didn’t just come from burning the wood.” They were also tossing in hunks of crystallized resin—called breu in Portuguese, or sepá to the Yawanawá—sourced from local trees. Later, when Costa visited breu collectors in the mountains, the scent was equally intoxicating yet entirely different: green notes wafting from the fresh sap. From that first trip, it was clear that breu would become the olfactive signature of Costa Brazil.

THE NAME

Despite the fact that Costa seldom wore fragrance (Guerlain’s Vetiver was an exception from his early years), this scent was his creative starting point for Costa Brazil. Still, for years its existence was a secret; the batch “sat there like wine” as he rolled out other products in the lineup. “I wanted people to see that Costa Brazil was genuine and came from a place of research, with ingredients that are completely unique,” he says, singling out the local superfood oils, kaya and cacay, found in the skin care. Against this landscape of earned authenticity, the fragrance has a simple gravitas. “That’s why I named it Aroma,” Costa says of his decision to avoid a labored-over title. “It really becomes part of your body.” The tagline that floated to mind for the fragrance—“For everyone, everything, everywhere”—spoke to its universality and its primordial roots: the forest as the place where it all begins.

THE SCENT

Costa brought samples of breu to a couple labs for analysis, and it was found to be a “super resin,” he says: antimicrobial, antibacterial, and mosquito-repellent, with a complex blend of 17 terpenes that shapes its singular scent profile. The brand worked to develop a breu branco essential oil, using a water-based extraction method; Costa imagined it layered with rainforest greenery and tiny orchids. The resulting fragrance opens with orange blossom and a dash of pepper, giving way to geranium and nutmeg. At the base, there’s an enveloping mix of cedarwood, vetiver, and patchouli. “Ultimately, there are notes that come and notes that go, and what's left is something that really evolves on the skin with such grace and presence that you really notice it,” he says. Some people feel the scent’s healing properties, which echoes the Yawanawás’ belief that breu helps open the third eye; others lean into its sensuality. “I’m very earthy, if not a hippie, and Aroma makes me feel at home,” says Costa. .

THE DESIGN

In keeping with the unassuming name, Costa chose an elemental design for the fragrance bottle: a simple wood box, with a hidden sliding door at the base for swapping in a refill. “I was very much inspired by Piero Manzoni,” he says of the Italian artist who emerged in the 1950s and came to be associated with Conceptual Art and the Arte Povera movement. “He was a self-deprecating man: Everything he did had some sort of humor to it, but also a very tactile quality.” The most direct inspiration for Aroma was Manzoni’s series of box-shaped pedestals that functioned as bases for a sculptural intervention. Often a Base Magica featured inset metal footprints, inviting a person to step up and be transformed into a work of art. A similar transference occurs when interacting with Aroma. The creative act is an embodied one. .

Francisco Costa, the founder of Costa Brazil.

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