The smell of a brand-new CD case, the papery drift of liner notes, and a sandwich shop warm with something toasted across the street from the studio: these are the sensory coordinates of the JoJo debut album era, and she can recall every one of them with startling precision. On a recent episode of the Nose Dive podcast, JoJo joined host Asia Grant, an NYC-based independent perfumer and creative director, to trace the scents that have quietly mapped her life, from a ferry crossing into New Jersey to record her first album, to the sunscreen-and-lotion world of a film set in the mid-2000s.
A Record That Smelled Like the Beginning
JoJo’s self-titled debut album was released on 22 June 2004, according to records held on Instagram, and the memory of making it is inseparable from atmosphere and scent. She was a teenager riding a ferry, absorbing everything around her, not yet knowing what was about to happen. What happened was considerable. The album went on to sell over four million copies and became her first Platinum record, as noted on her Spotify profile. Its lead single, ‘Leave (Get Out)’, made her the youngest solo artist ever to top the Billboard Pop Songs chart, at just 13 years old.
The fragrance world had already planted something in her imagination well before that. Growing up, JoJo says she was ‘bullied in school because I was always very eccentric,’ and she found a kind of sanctuary in big voices and bigger personalities. She remembers belting Christina Aguilera songs on the jungle gym. When Aguilera released her own fragrance, JoJo’s response was not cynicism but genuine, open-hearted logic: ‘Maybe if I wore her fragrance, I could sound like her. Maybe I could turn into her.’ The idea that scent could be a form of transformation, of borrowing someone else’s confidence or power, is one that has clearly stayed with her.
The debut album’s success set a trajectory that carried her through a string of hits: ‘Too Little Too Late’, ‘Baby It’s You’, and ‘Say So’. That last track, a collaboration with PJ Morton, would later win a Grammy Award for Best R&B Song in 2020, according to her Spotify profile. It is a measure of a career that has moved in waves rather than a single clean arc.
Aquamarine, Sunscreen, and the Scent of the JoJo Debut Album Years
A starring role alongside Emma Roberts and Sara Paxton in the 2006 teen fantasy film Aquamarine brought its own olfactory world. ‘That was such a moment,’ she says. ‘All of us girls were inspiring each other and sharing beauty products like lotions and sunscreen and just looking out for each other.’ The memory is as much texture and smell as it is image: tropical, warm, slightly sweet. If she were to bottle that chapter today, she says it would capture the feeling of EOS Beach Waves 24H Moisture Body Lotion and Body Mist and Toasted Marshmallow 24H Moisture Body Lotion and Body Mist. Equal parts comfort and coast.
Beyond the retrospective, JoJo has continued to build a body of work and a wider creative life. In September 2024, she published Over the Influence: A Memoir, according to Wikipedia, suggesting an artist as interested in articulating her experience as in soundtracking it.
As for what the next chapter smells like, she is unambiguous if wonderfully vague: ‘The next 12 months smells like ascension. It smells like expansion. Jazz. Golden hour. New York City. Europe.’ The full conversation with Asia Grant on Nose Dive covers opening for Usher, her favourite celebrity fragrances of the 2000s, and how scent functions as a channel for confidence, a thread that, for JoJo, runs from a jungle gym in childhood to a ferry crossing into New Jersey and outward from there.