Kevin Costner Is Particular About Scents—So He Made His Own Colognes

Nearly a decade ago the legendary actor encountered a body wash he couldn’t stop thinking about. Now, he’s made a line of scents with 19-69 because of it.Courtesy of 19-69Eight years ago, Kevin Costner was in Germany on a press tour. His hotel room was chock full of fruit baskets and other fancy accouterments that come with international fame. And also a handful of bath products. “I’m taking a shower and I’m thinking, ‘Man, this body wash smells good,’” he tells me from the couch of his modern white compound on a seaside street in Carpinteria, California. “And I’m thinking, ‘I don’t really use those words. Why would I even think that to myself?” Maybe two more times on that 15-day junket, he found himself thinking about the scent of that body wash.“Can’t tell you why, don’t even know what it was,” he says. “I came back home to America, and probably over the next year, periodically, I actually thought about it. But then it faded in like a song you can’t remember.”A few years later, he found himself in Scotland, scoring his Western epic Horizon. After a jetlagged detour to a countryside castle, he hopped in a hotel shower in Glasgow, and there it was: the smell. “I looked down and there were the bottles and I go, ‘That’s that smell from five or six years ago. That’s that smell,’" he recounts with his English lab, Bob, curled up at his side. “And I did something incredibly stupid. I went out of the shower and I got my phone.”He got water everywhere in the process, but at that moment he was singularly focused. “I go back in the shower and I take a picture of these bottles as if they were going to disappear. I could have just really finished my shower, honestly. Dried off like a normal human being. But what I’m saying was it fired my senses again, imagination. And I sent those pictures back and I said, ‘See if you can get a case of this. I’m never going to forget it again.’”It turned out to be 19-69’s Rainbow Bar, a scent inspired by both the ‘80s glam rock bands that frequented the Rainbow Bar on the Sunset Strip, along with general notes of California: there’s bourbon alongside basil and vetiver, creating a fragrance that’s simultaneously woody and green. That kickstarted Costner’s career as a perfumer. Now, he’s debuting a collection of fragrances with the same Milan-based niche perfume house. The collection consists of three fragrances (or extrait de parfum, to be precise), chicly advertised on 19-69’s website with a photo of Kevin Costner’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They retail at $80 per 7.5 milliliter bottle (a 30 ML bottle will run you $300, and the really giant 95 ML version costs a cool $800), and each fragrance—called After Hours, Heritage, and Pacific Coast Highway—reflects something of Costner’s life and history.He tells me this story from his living room, amid coffee table books on design and the American frontier, and a homemade scrapbook dedicated to Bob’s first year of life (the dog peed a little bit on my foot, but I took it as a compliment). I visited on a foggy day in June, walking into his home to be greeted by a view of the Pacific. Costner, who has an endless string of massive, monocultural hits—Field of Dreams, The Bodyguard, the tv show Yellowstone—has the aura of a Paul Newman-type, his bright blue eyes undiminished by the trail of drool and dog hair that Bob leave on his feather-light black sweater. The peculiarity that we are talking about his collaboration with 19-69, and not an upcoming film of his, is not lost on him. “I bring just a lot of feeling to things because I can’t always explain why I like something,” he says. “It’s like wine. I think, ‘oh, it smells like wood.’ But does it, really? The fuck it does.”After his second encounter with 19-69 products in Scotland, Costner’s assistant eventually tracked the brand’s co-founder Johan Bergelin down, and 19-69 sent him a case of the product. In 2024, he called Bergelin, to congratulate him on a job well done. They met in person for the first time that August in Cologne, Germany, which was not on purpose but did make them laugh. Shortly after that first meeting, they went ahead with a partnership, spending two years developing a collection of fragrances, produced in France.As a child growing up in a small town in the Skåne region of Sweden, Bergelin had, much like Costner, been seduced by a scent he encountered in the wild. His was a perfume at the local hair salon, a mass market scent from Karl Lagerfeld. An artist and designer, he eventually became a self-taught perfumer, and launched 19-69 in 2017 with his wife, Catharina, who handles communications and writes the colorful copy for each scent. The Milan-based brand—initially inspired by the culture and societal upheaval of 1969, the year of Bergelin’s birth—is known amongst self-described “fragheads” for its offerings tied to specific eras and places (Christopher Street, the Rainbow Bar in Hollywood, the island of Capri): their Miami Blue scent has a note of cocaine; the American Psycho perfume, a collaboration with Bret Easton Ellis (which just won an Allure “Best of Beauty” award), contains hints of palate-cleansing sorbet and harkens back to the products in Patrick Bateman’s prophetic 1980s beauty routine; Female Christ references a 1969 performance piece by Danish artist Lene Adler Petersen, in which she walked naked through the Copenhagen Stock Exchange carrying a cross. For the Costner collection, they’ve developed a group of three scents, titled After Hours, Pacific Coast Highway, and Heritage, all based on the actor’s life.After Hours, the signature scent of the collection, has notes of cypress, bourbon, and nutmeg; Bergelin describes as a version of 19-69’s Rainbow Bar fragrance “on steroids,” and says that for him, it evokes the image of someone in a glass house in the Hollywood Hills at sunset, surveying the city. It reminds Costner of shooting one of his first major magazine covers, the May 1989 issue of Vanity Fair, with the louche, legendary Helmut Newton. “So, I was in a tuxedo but my tie was off and my jacket was on the couch,” he recounts. “It was supposed to be a sexy shot with a glass of whiskey. And Helmut kept saying, ‘take your shirt off, just leave the bow tie on or something’... I said no. I’m not an exotic dancer!” He carefully notes that Newton was “so sweet” and did not make this suggestion in any sort of predatory fashion. He was merely opposed to looking like a Chippendale.Costner once wore After Hours to one of his son’s volleyball tournaments. “There were about 15 teams of teenage boys,” he says. “So the gym smelled really bad.” He says a pregnant woman kept staring at him, with her friend tugging her arm, urging her not to approach. “She walks all across the gym towards me,” he says. “And I wasn’t sure what this was going to be about. And she just turns to me and says, ‘Look, I’m married, I’m not [trying to bother you]. But what are you wearing?’” She did not ask for an autograph."The scent doesn’t have to be obvious,” he says. “But I love that it somehow becomes noticeable on its own merit, period."Pacific Coast Highway is lighter, with notes of clementine, juniper berry, and jasmine, Bergelin’s favorite. It smells like going to the beach in California (on a day without an algae bloom or whatever) and then taking a long hot shower after. It is clean without being boring, and I love it. Costner says the PCH scent reminds him of Tommy James and the Shandell’s 1968 hit “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” a lysergic earworm inspired by the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelations that most listeners and critics instead took to be a song about acid, amphetamines, or meth. “It’s easy,” he says. “A light sensory moment.”Heritage is a rich, masculine scent that nods to life on Costner’s sprawling ranch in Aspen, Colorado, with notes of cherry, violet leaves, amber, and vanilla, scents that sound sweet and girly on paper but add up to something whiskey-ish (“It’s on the richer side,” says Bergelin. “It has volume.”) Costner says it reminds him of “a place that’s very masculine, carpets and wood and guns and there’s a deepness to it like the wood of a place. It has a forest-y feeling to me.”Costner, an avid hunter, is eager to talk about guns as we sniff Heritage. He both believes in laws that limit them and sees them as heirlooms, like jewelry. “If you misuse a gun, you should never have one again,” he says. “But I have my father’s gun, and he got it when he was young. And so, when I put that gun to my cheek, I can feel him. When I was a boy, I would just ask him to let me hold it and it was much too heavy for me. And now it feels almost light as a feather. And my sons will one day put the gun to their cheek when I won’t be here, and they’ll remember those times in the field with that dog and everything else.”19-69’s tagline is “bottling counterculture.” But Costner, born in 1955, had a different experience of the hippie years. He was raised in a conservative household without much money in Southern California; his late brother left to serve in the Marines in Vietnam while other kids his age protested the war. He rigorously studied classical piano with an elderly instructor who had been around long enough to teach FDR. “You can imagine where the politics were with my mother and father, who wanted to support their son in Vietnam,” he says. “At the dinner table, long hair was bad. The music was bad. They didn’t like anything about it. And I was sitting there eating at that same table thinking I liked a lot of it.”He was too young to go full Woodstock. But he remembers what it was like to be around the culture. “A whole generation here went north to the Haight-Ashbury, to San Francisco, the Summer of Love,” he remembers. “I would watch the last exit out of Santa Barbara when there was no freeway. It was just a highway with lights, and the last one was like a last man out of Saigon moment. There would sometimes be as many as 60, 70 kids at that light with their thumbs out.”Costner’s best-known roles are visceral and sexy, and in watching them, it’s easy to conjure up scents: saddle leather, the grass of the Great Plains and baseball parks, sweat, campfires, gunpowder. Millions of people have formed their own relationships with him by going to the movies, surrounded by the scents of melted butter and spilled soda. One 2016 study examined the olfactory experience of going to the cinema, in which chemists asserted that audiences emitted different compounds, like carbon dioxide and isoprene, depending on the genre of film they were watching, unwittingly creating new scents for emotional or romantic scenes. If that’s true, which seems awfully nice to believe, Costner has, in one small way, been in the fragrance business for a long time.He says his favorite smells are lemon, cinnamon, and sage (“I knew [sage] as a hunter, not as an in-crowd thing”), and his house smells like cleanliness, or nothing. I asked if he likes the smell of movie theaters. “Not particularly,” he says. “I think what I miss in a theater is the curtain. But I know that smell of popcorn. It’s almost ceremonial, in a way, and it’s always lousy. It’s better when you cook it at home, it just is.”19-69After Hours Extrait de Parfum19-69Heritage Extrait de Parfum19-69Pacific Coast Highway Extrait de ParfumJocelyn Silver is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in titles like Vogue, W, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Architectural Digest, among other publications. ... Read More