Carolina Herrera’s fragrance business is ready to explode — and the brand is lighting a match.

Enter La Bomba, a new pillar from the brand that debuts Monday in travel retail before a global rollout beginning in the fall in time for fragrance’s all-important holiday season. Prices range by size, from $90 to $165 for 80-ml.

A statement from the company noted La Bomba is its most significant fragrance launch since 2016, when Herrera debuted the stiletto-shaped Good Girl. That fragrance, according to parent group Puig’s 2024 financial results, has become the largest women’s scent in both the U.S. and globally by sales.

Now the brand is ready to go deeper into the category.

“Carolina Hererra is one of the brands of the Puig portfolio that has the ambition to become a 1 billion euro brand and Good Girl had another outstanding year in 2024,” said Marc Puig, chairman and chief executive officer of Puig, in an email, adding that Herrera was key to the group maintaining leadership in Latin America across fashion, fragrance and makeup.

Executives declined to comment on sales expectations. Puig’s financial results for the first quarter show that the fragrance and fashion division, which houses Carolina Herrera, grew 10.4 percent in organic terms to reach 896.4 million euros, following a boost from fragrance. Companywide, Puig is forecasting a sales uptick between 6 percent and 8 percent for 2025.

In the U.S. market, fragrance is still beauty’s hottest category, having surpassed skin care as the second-largest sector by dollar sales in 2024. In the first quarter, fragrance grew 4 percent. Designer fragrances comprise the vast majority of those sales, and are largely driven by legacy players such as Carolina Herrera.

Yet Puig attributes both the category’s growth — and Herrera’s — to a new wave of consumption patterns. “Premium fragrances are no longer something people wear on special occasions but are part of everyday life. We’re seeing more interest in personalization, layering, high-end perfumes and niche scents, especially among younger consumers,” he said. “People want fragrances that feel unique. We have tried to capture that with La Bomba, which is a bold and expressive scent for today’s consumer.”

La Bomba, nosed by Givaudan perfumers Christophe Raynaud, Louise Turner and Quentin Bisch, opens with red dragon fruit, highlights cherry peony and frangipani and dries down to spicy vanilla. The juice is vegan and is comprised of 86 percent natural-origin ingredients.

“It’s a different woman than the Good Girl consumer,” said Ana Trias Arraut, president of Carolina Herrera, Nina Ricci and Dries Van Noten at Puig, who thinks the juice is universal and is looking more at psychographics than demographics in terms of consumer targeting. “We went with an archetype of a woman that is much more emotional, much less controlled. La Bomba is very free, spontaneous and unafraid to express feelings. Good Girl is a much more controlled woman.”

While the aim is to broaden the brand’s appeal to consumers who think differently, it still ladders up to the same brand ethos.

“What sets it apart is its capacity to reconcile contrasts: discipline with exuberance, classicism with irreverence, a vibrant Latin spirit with a distinctly New York sophistication,” said Jose Manuel Albesa, president of Puig’s beauty and fashion division, in an email. “This duality gives the brand a unique resonance in today’s fragmented cultural and aesthetic landscape.”

To that end, La Bomba, which took roughly four years to create, started from the same philosophical point of view.

“When we introduce a new product, especially a new pillar, it must be more than just a scent, it must be an idea,” Albesa said. “It’s a strategic decision, made only when we believe we can open up a new dimension of the brand and engage the consumer in a fresh, meaningful way. Flankers and line extensions are important for continuity, but a new pillar signals ambition, creativity and our confidence in expanding a brand’s cultural relevance.”

Albesa also highlighted that the brand “enables us to move fluidly across generations, geographies and cultural sensibilities,” pointing to Herrera’s 212 range’s success in Latin America, and the worldwide appeal of both Good Girl and Bad Boy. “Success is not only commercial, it expands the limits of our creative and strategic ambition.”

He’s particularly bullish on younger consumers. “La Bomba adds a new layer: emotional authenticity as a form of power. That’s a contemporary message and one that we believe will resonate strongly with a new generation of consumers seeking meaning and connection in what they wear.”

That sense of freedom inspired the butterfly-shaped flacon, Trias Arraut said, and the name was actually the late legendary editor Diana Vreeland’s nickname for Carolina Herrera herself. Although 2025 is the year of La Bomba, she still sees opportunities elsewhere in the brand’s portfolio.

“We’re still keen on building Good Girl, and extending that to types of fragrances that still make sense,” she said. “But we thought at this point we were able to bring something new.”

Trias Arraut credited the brand’s growth to cohesion between its fashion and beauty businesses, which are increasingly working in concert. For instance, the launch campaign fronted by Vittoria Ceretti “allows us to express another type of fashion from Wes. Vittoria is dressed in several dresses from Wes [Gordon, creative director of Herrera] where you will see the more colorful side of the brand,” she said. “When you think of the classical Good Girl ad, we touched less on that.”

Gordon said he was primarily involved in designing clothes for Ceretti’s campaign. “For me, designing the wardrobe was less about constructing outfits and more about shaping an atmosphere,” he said. “That’s the key to a strong fragrance campaign — it’s really about a woman, the specifics of that woman, her character and her persona.”

He went on to describe Ceretti as having “a classicism to her beauty and also an edge, and that’s the duality of the fragrance as well.”

“Not only is Vittoria beautiful, but she’s a global icon. Something that took us to her was her authenticity, the fact that she embraced this La Bomba woman and lives very freely, expresses her emotions even during the campaign, being very spontaneous and not controlling herself,” Trias Arraut added. “Even during interviews with us, she was loud, free, laughing and telling us why she would like to work on it. It was a super clear choice.”

The bottle shades are also a nod to the brand’s color palette. “There’s this pink-and-red bottle that is also classical and subversive, it’s a vivacious, vibrant, energetic elegance,” Gordon said, which has become a hallmark of the brand across facets of the business.

“Whether it’s in collections or in packaging, those are the colors we now use,” he said. “For La Bomba, this particular sharp fuchsia we’re now calling La Bomba pink.”

Gordon isn’t just imbuing similar visual cues across the businesses — he thinks of his customer the same way Trias Arraut does.

“It’s exactly the way I approach our fashion. It’s not about geographic region or an age bracket or demographic, it’s a state of mind,” Gordon said. “It’s about a woman who lives vibrantly, lives in exclamation points and dresses in them, too. Her clothes and her fragrances are her superhero capes.”

The opportunity for the brand lies in how well it can tap into that ethos.

“Beauty and fashion are so well aligned because our underlying theme is that our clients embrace what they wear, they want to be noticed, they dress for joy and they dress for pleasure,” Gordon said.

“They’re not wallflowers. It’s the fabulous Andy Warhol portrait of Mrs. Herrera herself with bright red lips, bold eye shadow, big jewelry, the hair, the dress, the colors. By focusing on those codes and that woman, they can so clearly be applied to fashion, beauty, fragrance, makeup and all the different categories in our world,” he continued.

The campaign will debut at launch, followed by a holiday campaign and a robust digital campaign across platforms.

“We learned this from Good Girl — we need to build projects over time,” Trias Arraut reasoned. “We’re here to build a long-term icon, this is not just a launch for the moment. And we have many projects coming forward to keep building La Bomba.”

That’s why the product is going first to travel retail ahead of the summer tourism season before rolling out to retail globally.

“It’s important to start in travel retail before the peak season for tourism. It’s a way to show it to the whole world because so many people are traveling,” she said. “Then, in August, September, we’ll launch it everywhere. We’ve tried to bring this idea of the butterfly to the point of sale, and we also are trying to bring a lot of storytelling. At the end of the day, the consumer is not only looking for a product, but also looking for an experience and a good moment to spend at point of sale.”