Walking through Bloomingdale’s on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Brittany Aldean passed the counters for Lancôme, which made her signature scent from high school (Miracle), and Chanel, whose Chance Eau Fraîche she wore in college. Now the former NBA dancer and American Idol contestant, a mother of two, has her own fragrance line, Vada, which recently released its first three scents. But, she told me, she didn’t expect Vada to end up at a store like Bloomingdale’s, and she wouldn’t want it there.
These days, Aldean is most famous for her marriage to the country-music star Jason Aldean and for her rising profile as a right-leaning lifestyle influencer. She’s selling her perfume directly to fans, with the aim of reaching women who, she said, “don’t feel like they’re seen by the beauty industry”—who prioritize family and faith, even if they’re building a career. If the point of a perfume is not just to smell nice but also to project an identity, Aldean is selling the vision of a conservative woman who has it all.
Aldean certainly seems to. On Instagram, she posts idyllic shots from her Nashville-area farm, at the rodeo, and from backstage at Jason’s concerts. Her kids, who are 7 and 8, are regularly featured in scenes from their family life—Little League games, Easter-egg hunts, moments goofing around at home. She is a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and visited the Oval Office earlier this month, during which time the president asked her to choose between two samples of marble, then handed her selection to a contractor to use in the new White House ballroom, she said. (A White House official told me that it cannot comment on private conversations that may or may not have happened.) When Vada had a pop-up event in Athens, Georgia, women wrapped around the block to buy a bottle and take a picture with Aldean.
Vada is not explicitly MAGA, but it codes conservative because Aldean herself does. One of her most attention-grabbing posts, from 2022, provoked a strong reaction from those who saw it as anti-trans: “I’d really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase,” reads the caption on a video of her applying makeup. “I love this girly life.” She told Evie, a sort of conservative women’s Cosmopolitan, that the backlash fueled her to start Vada: “I needed to stick to my values and be honest.” An Austin-based jewelry and eyewear company that’s also called Vada is suing Aldean’s company over the name, and a spokesperson told beauty journalists that it wants to make clear that its brand is “run by somebody with completely different political affiliations.” (Both Vadas declined to comment on the pending litigation.)
Conservative women such as Aldean are part of a lucrative and potentially growing market. Evie was founded in 2019 on the premise that beauty magazines had gotten too “woke,” and it has built a small but dedicated audience, as well as an outsize media presence. The Christian makeup company Elevate Beauty sells lip products in shades such as “Called to Boldness,” “She Will Not Fall,” and “Uncancellable”; the company Nimi offers “Anti-Woke Skincare” (a kind of virtue signaling about virtue signaling) and has partnered with the conservative podcaster Candace Owens. These new brands saw an opening “to market products, particularly beauty products, at a pretty high price point to conservative women,” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian at Calvin University and the author of Live Laugh Love, a forthcoming book about white-Christian womanhood, told me. At just under $100 for a full-size bottle, Aldean’s perfume isn’t exactly cheap, but she said that she wants it to be an aspirational luxury for her fan base.
Aldean’s own approach to beauty is traditionally feminine—the day we met, her long blond hair was blown out, and her full-face makeup was so flawless that the woman behind the Chanel counter complimented it. She was wearing a long, black trench coat and black stiletto boots, accessorized with a leopard-print headband and zebra-print acrylic nails. She told me that she is not a tradwife. “Love them. All power to them,” she said. “I’m just more of a go-getter.” For Aldean, femininity is fueled by the distinctiveness between men and women. “I mean, there’s a reason God created women and men, and we’re very separate,” she told me. Women have “got the magic,” and she wanted her brand to “lean into that.” The fragrance’s tagline is: “For women who effortlessly do it all.”
That have-it-all ideal of womanhood is far more common among young conservative Christian women than anything resembling a tradwife model, Katie Gaddini, a sociology professor at University College London and the author of a forthcoming book on conservative Christian women, Esther’s Army, told me. Of the more than 90 women she has interviewed, only one followed a tradwife influencer on social media. (However, dozens of my liberal friends follow the most prominent account, Ballerina Farm, out of morbid curiosity.) By and large, Gaddini has found that young Christian women want to be a wife and a mother and have a high-powered job; their models are conservative figures such as Megyn Kelly and Erika Kirk, who combine a hyperfeminine appearance with “a hardbitten toughness,” she said. “Even though the emphasis is still on traditional marriage and having children, career is still front of mind.” If a liberal have-it-all womanhood says, “Have a career and a family,” this conservative womanhood says, “Have a family and a career.”
That hierarchy has its own challenges. Finding independence can be hard “when you are in a relationship where it’s so much about the man, and you’re trying to find your place in it all,” Aldean said. Her husband’s fame and music career are always going to carry a certain amount of weight in their lives. Sometimes her ambitions and his line up: The Aldeans recently released a duet, in one of her first major performances since American Idol. But unlike music, Vada is entirely hers.
And so far, the company’s sales have surpassed her expectations. (She had been nervous about selling a direct-to-consumer perfume that buyers couldn’t try on, but the reception has been “very, very dreamy,” she said.) She spent two and a half years building the brand, working with the French perfumer Robertet to concoct her ideal scents: crisp, citrusy “1924” “embodies confidence”; “Georgia Dream” is flirty and peachy (good for a music festival, she said); and “Muse,” which I bought because I’d heard it was the subtlest, is “romantic.”
I tried it in the office, and no amount of rose, jasmine, and sandalwood could make me feel “romantic” beneath the fluorescent lighting. Maybe I should have opted for 1924 and its promise of self-assured professionalism. But I liked the way I smelled, even if I could not say exactly what, olfactory-wise, differentiates this perfume from one that does not “honor the multi-facets of feminine strength.” Many commercial perfumes are made by the same small number of manufacturers, and Robertet has collaborated with several brands that Aldean and I saw on the Bloomingdale’s floor. But a perfume’s success, ultimately, depends not just on its scent but on the promise it makes about who a woman will be when she wears it. Aldean is betting that plenty of women want what she’s promising.