Makeup artist and content creator Daisy Marquez is launching her first beauty venture. Partnering with Judah Abraham of brand incubator Slate Brands, she’s introducing a fragrance: Bella Perversa.
“It’s in Spanish,” said Marquez, who was born in Mexico, immigrated to the U.S. at just 1 year old and was raised in Dallas.
It translates to beautiful and wicked, she explained. “I grew up watching a lot of telenovelas, and in a lot of the telenovelas that I watched, the women were embodying the femme fatale character.”
That was the inspiration for the scent, bottled in a deep red hue, with notes of cherry, white tea, mandarin, jasmine, tuberose, orange blossom, vanilla, coffee and patchouli. She worked with a lab in New York, where the fragrance is manufactured. Priced at $68, it launches on Tuesday at bellaperversa.com.
The brand expects first-year sales in the low seven figures, according to industry sources.
A look at the new fragrance, Bella Perversa.
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Marquez, 27, began making beauty tutorials in high school.
“I learned to do makeup due to competitive dancing,” she said. “We would have to do our own makeup. And so that’s kind of where my passion started for makeup.”
But it was also deeper.
“Because of my immigration status, I wasn’t able to afford college because I was getting charged as an international student, so I got very upset and depressed. And my outlet for coping with my depression was makeup,” she went on. She now has a nonprofit, the Daisy DACA Foundation, which provides financial aid to those in the program and scholarships for immigrants in the U.S.
She started on Snapchat and Twitter, where she grew her audience, before getting on YouTube. Today, she has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, 1.43 million subscribers on YouTube and more than half a million fans on TikTok.
“I definitely see this obviously being way bigger than just me,” she said of her fragrance brand. She has more fragrances coming and plans to throw pop-up events before entering retail.
“I eventually see it in Sephora,” she added. “I’m manifesting that right now.”
Daisy Marquez
Courtesy of Daisy Marquez
