above: A meeting of the minds beneath the vines: Kelly Rutherford and Veronique Gabai dream up their next creation over lunch at Villa Botanica, the perfumery center of DSM-Firmenich in Grasse.
Veronique Gabai and Kelly Rutherford on the friendship behind Rose Première, and why the best fragrances are made, not manufactured.
Some friendships are built DURING YEARS OF CLOSE CONTACT, the slow accumulation of dinners, school pickups and shared zip codes. Veronique Gabai and Kelly Rutherford’s was not. Theirs began on a philanthropic project, the kind of one-off collaboration that could easily have stayed just that. Instead, it turned into something neither woman expected: a scent.
Gabai, the French-born perfumer behind Maison Veronique Gabai, has spent decades translating emotion into fragrance, first for some of the biggest names in beauty, later under her own name. Rutherford, the actress known to generations for Gossip Girl and Melrose Place, was not looking to launch a fragrance. She was looking for a friend she trusted, and found one in Gabai. What grew out of that trust is Rose Première, a limited-edition scent built around the Rose de Mai of Grasse, the rare rose hand-harvested in the first light of May, when its perfume is at its most potent.
Gabai’s Westport property sits on a stretch of the Saugatuck River with a history as layered as anything in a bottle: it is the site of the old Bradley Tool Factory, dating back to the 1800s, complete with a waterfall that still runs along the water. “Living by the sea in Westport reconnects me to my childhood in the South of France, where the Mediterranean shaped my earliest memories of scent. The salt in the air, the light on the water and the fragrance of flowers carried by the breeze all feel deeply familiar. There is love in that sense of recognition—the love we carry for the places that formed us. Westport has its own distinctive rhythm and elegance, yet it awakens the same sense of freedom, beauty and possibility that continues to inspire everything I create,” says Gabai.
It is the kind of home that makes you understand her instinct for building something with history baked in rather than manufactured from scratch, whether a factory turned home or a fragrance built on a friendship.
“Everything meaningful starts with love,” Rutherford says of the project. The line sounds like marketing copy until you hear the story behind it. This was not a brand built by a room full of consultants and focus groups. It’s a product built by two women who liked spending time together who decided to bottle what that felt like.
The fragrance itself opens with bright, sparkling citrus and green notes giving way to the rose at its center. Then it settles into something warmer: soft woods, musk, a whisper of praline. Gabai describes the result as joyful and unfussy, a scent for a woman who does not need permission to take up space. “This fragrance celebrates energy, creativity, and the entrepreneurial spirit,” she says. “It’s for women who embrace passion, joy and adventure—approaching life with confidence, curiosity and the drive to create and inspire.”
The first 2,000 bottles carry Rutherford’s name directly, a small but pointed detail. Each one is engraved, capped in pink, wrapped in a custom sleeve bearing a handwritten message from Rutherford herself. It is the kind of touch that makes sense between people who actually like each other, the fragrance equivalent of a note left on a friend’s kitchen counter.
That same instinct shaped the collaboration’s second act. Gabai’s Maison is known for Le Spritz, a signature fragrance necklace that lets its wearer carry a scent without ever touching a bottle. For the holidays, Gabai invited Rutherford to make it her own, and the result is a necklace set with rose quartz, a stone Rutherford chose herself for what it represents: unconditional love, feminine strength, the quiet kind of power that does not need to announce itself. Available in chrome and gold, designed to be worn by anyone, it is less an accessory than a small, wearable piece of the friendship that started it all.
What makes the story land is how little of it feels engineered. Grasse has been perfume’s spiritual home for centuries, and the Rose de Mai has inspired more launches than anyone could count. What sets this one apart is not the ingredient: it is the relationship behind it, two women from different worlds, different continents, different chapters of life, who found in each other a shared belief in creativity and joy, and decided the best way to mark that was to make something beautiful together.
Rose Première is available for purchase now at veroniquegabai.com, alongside the Le Spritz necklace, a fitting note to end the year on: a friendship, bottled, worn close and given away.