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New York beauty brand Costa Brazil has announced two new fragrances, Breu and Capim Dourado, for November release, six months after founder Francisco Costa opened the label’s first permanent store at Hudson Yards. Costa, formerly women’s creative director at Calvin Klein, built the brand around an Amazonian resin called breu, and the first of the new scents takes its name.
Costa Brazil describes Breu as a cool spice and warm woods fragrance built on the sacred resin of the jungle, with a warm, uplifting trail that feels grounding and modern. Fragrantica’s listing, which files it as aromatic for women and men with woody, amber and warm spicy accords leading, opens on elemi, citrus and sap and carries breu branco, olibanum and oud through the heart. Sandalwood, vanilla and patchouli close it out.
Bergamot, cardamom, ginger and pink pepper sit at the top of the second scent, which Fragrantica files as aromatic and spicy for men and women. Maté, tonka bean, iris root and jasmine fill the heart. Vetiver and saffron anchor a base that also carries capim dourado itself, the golden grass of the name, which grows in the cerrado of Tocantins state.
Master perfumer Frank Voelkl refined Aroma, the brand’s debut fragrance, after perfumer David Moltz and Costa had worked through 35 variations of breu. Costa chose the plain name to avoid a laboured title. The scent is meant to smell like the Amazon rainforest at dawn, with white jungle flora, Brazil orange oil, pink pepper and grapefruit zest on top and myrrh in the heart, and it shares pink pepper and vetiver with Capim Dourado.
A 30 ml bottle costs $198, with Aedes listing the refill at $150, and the first sales came through the brand’s website and Dover Street Market in New York, London, and Paris. The packaging draws on Piero Manzoni’s work: a slide mechanism opens a box of sustainably sourced white ash with a red oak finish to reveal a refillable glass flacon, and a retailer’s listing credits the eau de parfum with Marie Claire’s 2024 Fragrance Packaging Award in the US. It’s unisex and vegan, and the brand says its ingredients evoke stress-reducing phytoncides. A roll-on version, Aroma em Óleo, is made with patauá oil and sells for $79 at Stéle in Williamsburg. “The fragrance smells slightly different on everyone,” Costa has said of the original.
Born in Minas Gerais, Costa studied English at Hunter College by day and fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology by night, then designed collections at Gucci and Oscar de la Renta on the way to 13 years at Calvin Klein. A trip to Brazil’s rainforest after he left in 2016 ended with a rock of resin going off to a lab, at a point when a fragrance with IFF was already in development, and the man behind it seldom wore scent, Guerlain’s Vetiver being the early exception.
Samples sent to labs came back as what he calls a “super resin”: antimicrobial and antibacterial, a mosquito repellent too, with a complex blend of 17 terpenes behind the scent. The resin comes from the almacega tree, and among the Yawanawá people, who call it sepá, it is burned in healing rituals meant to cleanse the air and spirit; Costa says Indigenous communities in Brazil also use it to seal canoes. Breu branco, the white form, belongs to the Burseraceae family along with frankincense and myrrh. Retailer copy says the brand works with Conservation International on sourcing practices.
Fresh sap from breu collectors in the mountains smelled green, a different scent entirely, and the first trip had already made clear that breu would become the brand’s olfactive signature. “Immediately, Costa Brazil became alive to me,” he told 10 Magazine of that first whiff. The brand later developed a breu branco essential oil using a water-based extraction method.
The Resina de Breu, billed as a modern take on incense, has been in the line since the early days. A Breu soap bar and handcrafted Breu incense debuted at the Hudson Yards store in May, and the Vela Jungle Candle pairs white and black breu resin with wild jungle flora, crushed cypress root and Brazilian vetiver.
Costa Brazil launched in 2019, and when Amyris, which had acquired it in 2021, went bankrupt two years later, Costa bought back the intellectual property rights and trademarks ahead of a full relaunch in 2024.
The store on Level 1 at Hudson Yards was designed with Alexander May, and its shelves hold the brand’s skin, body, hair and home lines beside Brazilian design pieces sourced from galleries. It hosts monthly conversations with artists and collaborators, and the brand has said partnerships will follow, including rotating installations with Brazilian furniture designers and art galleries.
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