Millie Bobby Brown is in her lover era. The 19-year-old has the “This Is Taylor Swift” Spotify playlist on and, given the ease with which Brown’s mother is mouthing along to the lyrics, it seems it’s not a rare occurrence. Her fiancé Jake Bongiovi, son of Jon Bon Jovi, is by her side, hyping her up over photos of her in a pink Versace skirt suit and tending to one of their many dogs, Winnie the Pooh, who is in her own dress and pink stroller.
Famous since the age of 11 thanks to her leading role in “Stranger Things,” Brown has navigated her teens in the public eye and presents as much older and wiser than her years. She’s grown up, she says, and she’s all about being true to herself and loving who she is. That makes it the right moment for her to launch a fragrance based on the idea of celebrating herself and whomever may wear it.
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“I was never allowed to wear fragrance when I was younger,” Brown says. “So I’m 19, I finally started finding who I am and figuring out who I am — slowly — and fragrance, it just feels very womanly. It just feels like the next step.”
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The “Stranger Things” star has become more and more of a multihyphenate in recent years, launching her own Gen Z-focused clean beauty brand, Florence by Mills Beauty, in 2019 and revealing she’s releasing her first book, “Nineteen Steps,” this September. The introduction of the fragrance, Wildly Me, marks the next stage of expansion for Florence by Mills. The product will launch with a waitlist on Aug. 14 and will officially be available on the brand’s website on Aug. 22.
Wildly Me, which was developed by Give Back Beauty and done in collaboration with fragrance house Givaudan, comes in a frosted glass bottle with purple branding, and ranges in price from $24 to $65. It has notes of bergamot, sage, violet, purple iris, blooming wisteria and lavender. When sampling different scents, the combination was presented to Brown under the name “second skin,” which seemed kismet to her.
“‘Second skin’ captured the essence of exactly what I wanted for the brand. I believe in signs, and I came into this knowing I wanted my fragrance to smell like a person. Whatever it is, it feels nostalgic and authentic and real,” Brown says. “There was something about ‘second skin’ that spoke to me. So that was our base and foundation, and then we built and subtracted and added.”
Florence was launched as a clean beauty brand and, keeping with that, Wildly Me is made with Orpur classified ingredients, a labeling certifying its use of natural, raw materials.
“It’s important to me because as a young person growing up in the industry and growing up in a makeup chair, I never knew what the makeup artist was putting on my skin. And that scared me,” Brown says. “My godfather, Matthew Modine, he said to me, ‘Whatever they put on your skin goes into your bloodstream,’ and that stuck with me for a really long time. And it made me think, ‘Why don’t I go into a store and find a company that I feel like I can wear?’
“So I make Florence by Mills for me and my generation of people that are trepidatious in going into skin care at a young age and beauty at a young age. It’s not about understanding how to contour or put on fake eyelashes, but actually understand what their skin needs. How to add to your skin and add to your beauty, but still see that freckle that you may hate, still see that bushy brow that you may try to kind of simmer down. These are things that we want you to accentuate and love about yourself. So it’s such a deeper meaning.”
She very much views the Florence brand as representative of where she is in each stage of life; the brand evolves with her.
“Florence grows with me. It’s kind of a beautiful coming of age company,” she says. “The brand started in 2019, and I never initially thought I was going to do a fragrance until it kind of came to me, like OK, this is something that feels right, something that people are asking for. And I actually don’t have a perfume that I particularly like and have gravitated toward, so building that and finding my fragrance was a real journey. Staying true to who I am and what I love is the journey of finding my fragrance.”
Her current state is very much come as you are, embrace what makes you unique, be yourself. She cites Blake Lively’s lack of a professional stylist as a fashion inspiration, as well as the trailblazing looks of Zendaya, and is on her own journey style and beauty wise.
“I’ve had all the phases. But ultimately I’ve now landed in this very simple, soft fabric [stage]. Everything is minimalistic in my fashion right now. And that I think portrays my mental state as well,” she says. “Everything is very laid back and simple and easy and on the go, I mean everything. You know what I mean? I don’t want to wear anything that’s too fitting. Right now in my life, I want to wear the clothes, I don’t want things to wear me.”
The same goes for Wildly Me and its wearers.
“We don’t want it to smell like a fragrance. We want it to smell like a person, we want it to smell like a field that you’ve walked into. I want people to smell it and feel joy, and positivity,” she says. “And so when you have a company that already used that sense, it’s kind of an easy transition to use those same [for fragrance].”
Brown at her age is smack in the middle of the generation of the social media obsessed, yet she’s chosen to largely step away from it, using it sparingly to see how fans use the Florence products.
“TikTok, Facebook, Instagram — I love seeing the way people use Florence. It’s really cool. Even though I don’t have those social medias actually on my phone, I get to have people send them to me,” she says. “It’s really cool to see how people use the brand in their own way. In most of the tutorials I always say ‘you can do it like this, but ultimately it’s your journey.’ They’re your products.”
These days her Instagram output is mostly posts about shelter dogs available for adoption; at any given moment her home in Georgia is housing several different ones, and she works with local shelters as well to help place animals, a decidedly good use of social media. Otherwise, she tries to keep herself free from it all.
“I personally feel it wasn’t adding anything to my life. And I felt positive when I didn’t have it on my phone. I just felt like I could live my life with more confidence and freedom, mental freedom [without social media],” she says. “I just feel better for it. But that doesn’t mean that the good social media I don’t get to see: I just have a wonderful team that kind of censors it all, so that I can protect myself.”
“Nineteen Steps,” out mid-September, is not the typical celebrity memoir but rather the telling of Brown’s family history, set in 1940s Bethnal Green, London.
“I think it’s nice for people to have a look through a window and see how my heart is, because so many people love my characters and are interested in my characters. But for people to actually…I try to keep a lot of people out,” she says. “I draw the curtains because I believe in privacy for my own sanity really, just to keep people out and lock that fence. But it’s nice to be able to open the curtains and let people see what I’m interested in, and to share that joy with others and see if they’re interested in what I’m interested in.”
Still, she is sticking to her privacy-first approach when it comes to planning her wedding to Bongiovi; the pair revealed their engagement in April and she says plans are well underway.
“I think probably drawing the curtains, just because there are only so many moments in life that you get only once. And to have everyone’s opinions and eyes looking at that just feels unnatural to me,” she says of wedding planning. “So I feel it’s important to keep those things, those small precious moments in life, really close to your chest. I can say that the planning is going — it’s so fun and it’s such an exciting time in my life.”
While she waits for the actors’ and writers’ strikes to resolve and the final season of “Stranger Things” to kick off filming, she’s spending time at home with Bongiovi and their many, many animals. The finale of “Stranger Things” will be bittersweet but she’s ready for that chapter to close.
“I think I’m ready. It’s been such a huge factor in part of my life, but it’s like graduating high school, it’s like senior year,” she says. “You’re ready to go and blossom and flourish and you’re grateful for the time you’ve had, but it’s time to create your own message and live your own life.”
This interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Photographer: Katie McCurdy
Hair: Jacob Rozenberg
MUA: Samantha Lau
Styling: Alex Badia
Marketing: Emily Mercer
Senior Market Editor, Accessories: Thomas Waller
Fashion Assistants: Kimberly Infante and Ari Stark