Some artists keep journals. JoJo keeps smells. The singer who topped the Billboard Pop Songs chart at 13 has a sensory memory that functions like a personal archive – ferry rides, studio sandwiches, sunscreen-sticky film sets – each one locked to a specific chapter of a life that moved very fast, very early.
The Ferry, the CD Case, and the Smell of Becoming Famous
JoJo remembers recording her self-titled debut album with a specificity that most people reserve for weddings or funerals. The ferry ride into New Jersey. The sharp, chemical smell of a brand-new CD case cracking open for the first time. The papery warmth of album liner notes – that particular smell that anyone who grew up buying physical music will recognize instantly. And the sandwich shop across the street from the studio, whose aromas drifted over and attached themselves to everything.
These weren’t just nice details. They became the olfactory fingerprints of her origin story. Fragrance has worked that way for her since childhood – not as luxury, but as aspiration and identity. As a kid who got bullied for being “very eccentric,” she found a kind of refuge in the idea that scent could be transformative. She used to belt Christina Aguilera songs on the jungle gym at school. When Aguilera released her fragrance, JoJo’s logic was completely sincere: “Maybe if I wore her fragrance, I could sound like her. Maybe I could turn into her.”
That impulse – using someone else’s scent as a costume for the person you want to become – is not as strange as it sounds. It’s the same reason people buy a perfume after meeting someone magnetic, or why certain department store smells still feel like safety. JoJo just articulated it more honestly than most adults would bother to.
She didn’t need Aguilera’s fragrance for long. “Leave (Get Out)” made her the youngest solo artist to top the Billboard Pop Songs chart – at 13. The hits came quickly after: “Too Little Too Late,” “Baby It’s You,” “Say So.” She was a teenager navigating a career that most people spend their entire twenties trying to build.
Aquamarine, Sunscreen, and What a Film Set Smells Like at 15
In 2006, JoJo appeared alongside Emma Roberts and Sara Paxton in Aquamarine, the teen fantasy film that leaned hard into a very specific kind of early-2000s coastal summer aesthetic. Body glitter. Flip-flops. The kind of movie where the lighting always looks like 5 p.m. on a beach in July.
What JoJo remembers most about that period isn’t the script or the cameras – it’s the social fabric of being on set with other young women who were figuring things out at the same speed she was. “All of us girls were inspiring each other and sharing beauty products like lotions and sunscreen and just looking out for each other,” she says. That collective experience – lotion being passed around, sunscreen smells mixing in warm air – is the thing that stayed.
When asked what that chapter of her life would smell like if she bottled it today, she didn’t hesitate: EOS Beach Waves 24H Moisture Body Lotion and Body Mist, alongside EOS Toasted Marshmallow 24H Moisture Body Lotion and Body Mist. Tropical, sweet, and warm in equal measure. It’s a choice that makes a certain kind of sense – those products exist in the same emotional register as the era she’s describing. Uncomplicated. A little nostalgic. The kind of thing that smells like not yet knowing how complicated things get.
The early 2000s had a distinct fragrance culture that’s been getting a second look lately – celebrity scents were everywhere, and wearing them meant something specific about who you wanted to be aligned with. JoJo talked through all of it on Nose Dive, the podcast hosted by Asia Grant, an NYC-based independent perfumer and creative director. Their conversation covered celebrity fragrances of the era, opening for Usher, and what it felt like to build confidence through scent at an age when confidence is the last thing most teenagers have in reliable supply.
The Aquamarine set, the Billboard chart at 13, the sandwich shop near the New Jersey studio – these aren’t just anecdotes. They’re the kind of details that explain why someone grows into an adult with a highly developed relationship to smell. When your formative experiences are compressed into a very short window of time and attached to very specific sensory environments, you either develop an acute memory for those things or you don’t. JoJo clearly did.
There’s something worth noting about how she describes those years without visible bitterness, even given the legal battles that later froze her recording career for years – disputes with her label that kept her music off streaming platforms for an extended period. The smells she associates with that era are warm ones. That’s either a sign of genuine peace with the past, or very good editing.
What She Says the Next 12 Months Will Smell Like
When asked about the future, JoJo answered in the same sensory language she uses for everything else. “The next 12 months smells like ascension. It smells like expansion. Jazz. Golden hour. New York City. Europe.” It reads like a mood board someone turned into a sentence – vague enough to mean anything, specific enough to feel intentional.
Jazz and golden hour aren’t scents you can find on a shelf. But New York City and Europe both have recognizable, complicated smells – neither of them clean or simple. Whether that’s the point or just the natural way JoJo talks about her life, it’s a different kind of projection than a 13-year-old reaching for Christina Aguilera’s fragrance on a drugstore shelf. This time, she’s not trying to smell like someone else. The question is what, exactly, she’s trying to smell like instead.
