Nairobi News

Life is like a book and every chapter marks a new beginning.

For singer Judith Nyambura Mwangi popularly known as Avril, venturing into the beauty and perfume industry is another step into her journey as an artist.

Her brand titled “My everything” was launched in December last year. It consists a perfume, mist and a body cream.

The singer says personal care has always been important to her especially after battling acne for a while.

And being famous doubled the pressure for her to have that flawless look.

“My everything is something I have been working on at different stages of my life and it reached a point when I started questioning myself on what’s next. I have built my brand. People know me as an artist so how else can I be able to explore the what next factor. But tapping into the beauty industry was not something I thought I wanted to venture into even though personal care is very important to me,” she explains.

“The opportunity presented itself to me through a friend. And as a curious human being I decided to pursue and find out more about the perfumery industry and that is how the journey started. Through experimenting, I was able to find something that I would be passionate about other than music,” she said.

The idea for her was to create a product that is fun, feminine and chilled to represent that independent woman who is confident about herself. And to be able to achieve that for her body mist she went for scents that are popular and have stood the test of time in terms of creating great fragrance.

“Vanilla is one of the scents I wanted to explore, caramel is also a scent I included. But just combining vanilla and caramel meant my perfume would smell too sweet so I added a musk to sort of tone down the sweet smell. It has been quite a journey learning about different scents and coming up with that desired fragrance,” she explains.

“I call it my everything because creating it has made me step out of my comfort zone which is music and venture into new territory. I have had to learn everything from scratch and it is very intricate because it involves some chemistry which we learnt in school, not to mention the business aspect when it comes to design and product placement.”

My Everything is locally produced however some of the ingredients used are outsourced from outside the country with the majority sourced locally.

The new venture mirrors that of her counterparts namely Nonini and Nameless, who are also reinventing themselves in other industries.

The two recently ventured into the fashion industry.

Nonini who is currently based in the US, launched his shoe and casual wear line titled “Mgenge2ru”, while Nameless launched his apparel line called the “N-Zone”.