After years of influencing which perfumes people buy, fragrance creator Funmi Monet is launching an offering of her own.
The Dallas-based influencer — a mainstay within the ever-growing online fragrance community — has joined forces with Sephora to launch Influxious, her vision for accessible, luxury fragrance. Featuring four scents that are priced at $150 per 50-ml. bottle, Influxious will bow July 27 on sephora.com and direct-to-consumer, with an in-store Sephora rollout to follow in the fall.
The brand is inspired in part by Monet’s Nigerian heritage, as well as the 800,000-strong community she’s built across social media platforms since taking up content creation in 2018.
“I want Influxious to be fun. I want people to feel like they belong within our Influxious universe — not like they’re visiting, but that you are a card-carrying member and you get to sit with us,” said Monet, who was approached years ago by Sephora about launching a brand. Upon developing and presenting the concept for Influxious, she became a member of the 2025 Sephora Accelerate Program cohort.
The full Influxious lineup, which includes $35 10-ml vials of each scent.
Monet worked with Mane perfumer Gino Percontino to develop the brand’s four eaux de parfum, which include spicy-caramel Gold Standard; fruity-floral Magic Hour; a raspberry- and frankincense-infused scent called High Life, inspired by the West African music genre of the same name, and Well Loved, which is Monet’s take on a skin scent featuring shea butter and cashmeran at its base.
“A skin scent for me is very different than what skin scents are typically advertised as — something soapy or musky or baby powdery. But growing up, my mom was putting cocoa butter and shea butter on me, so that’s what I identify as a skin scent,” said Monet, who is also a licensed therapist and in 2025 obtained her Art of Perfumery certification from ISIPCA in Versailles. “I realized there are not really products that center my own experiences — and not just mine, but those of many people that look like me across the diaspora.”
She continued: “Influxious is about decentering what is a very European standard for how fragrances are created. I went to school in France, because that’s where the education is, but also wanted to take a step back and say, ‘how can people that look like me — and not necessarily literally me — but how can people who look like me be able to experience fragrance?’”
Though Monet did not specify sales expectations for the launch, industry sources expect Influxious will surpass the seven-figure sales threshold during its first year on the market. At Sephora, it joins a mixed assortment of designer fragrances including those from Dior, YSL Beauty and Tom Ford, among others, as well as buzzy indie and niche players like Phlur, Ellis Brooklyn and Kayali, which is the number-one fragrance brand at Sephora.
“We want to sit comfortably alongside prestige brands, but we also want to feel accessible to customers who are ready to try something that’s a little bit different than what they’re used to,” Monet said.
The launch comes as Sephora increasingly bets on influencer brands, introducing Salish Matter’s Sincerely, Yours last September, shortly after it added Desi Perkins’ Dezi Skin a month prior. In fragrance, Jackie Aina’s Forvr Mood also sells at Sephora.
Funmi Monet with Influxious Gold Standard Eau de Parfum.
Courtesy
While fragrance brands are increasingly cocreating products with influencers (for instance, Dossier recently partnered with TikToker Ken Eurich for its It Factor launch in 2025, and in March, Snif debuted a scent codeveloped with Mikayla Nogueira), Monet is the first TikTok-native, next-gen influencer to launch a fragrance brand of their own.
“For me, opening the door means you’re not the only one that walks through it, but also, as a fragrance influencer who’s launching a fragrance brand in a major retail space, I understand the implications of it if it doesn’t do well,” said Monet, who has leaned into a building-in-public strategy for Influxious, updating her community along the way in order to get feedback and generate pre-launch buzz. The strategy is working: the Influxious waitlist has garnered nearly 10,000 sign-ups even with the launch being weeks out.
“Community is our number-one thing, because community is the reason we’re here,” said Monet, adding she plans to host in-store events and incorporate Influxious into virtual smell clubs, among other perfume communities, during Year One as ways to get the word out beyond leveraging her own platforms.
“Our second priority is our operations…I’m investing in bringing people in who are excellent at forecasting and inventory planning and financial discipline. I’ve seen so many brands go into retail — especially Black-owned brands — not having the right people in place to help make financial decisions and it be detrimental to the brand. So we want to make sure we’re growing at a meaningful pace that’s also sustainable.”
