Hosted by perfumer and creative director Asia Grant, Nose Dive will begin with a deep dive into Y2K fragrance nostalgia featuring guest Joanna Levesque — better known to the series’ target millennial and Gen Z audience as pop icon JoJo. The five-episode season will roll out throughout the late summer and fall, including a live-taping at Refinery29’s BeautyCon event in September. 

According to Eos, Refinery29 approached the brand as a potential sponsor for the podcast’s debut season even before Eos launched its first body mists in December 2025. The opportunity appealed to the brand to act as more than just a sponsor, but also a “co-producer” of the first season. 

“Podcasts have become such an important part of influencing how people think,” said Eos president Soyoung Kang. “There are many ways in which brands are taking part in branded content, whether it’s episodic series on social media, maybe even streaming content series, things like that. In our case, we really wanted this specific objective of being part of the narrative of the forces driving fragrance as an industry. We felt like podcasts were the perfect channel to do that.” 

Brooke DeVard, who joined Refinery29 as chief content officer in 2025, said fragrance is also an increasingly important part of the publication’s channels, which also cover topics like fashion, identity and finances for a largely female audience. Fragrance is Refinery29’s fastest-growing beauty vertical, and 52% of its audience considers fragrance an integral form of self-expression, according to the publication. 

“It’s the stories and the language around fragrance that makes it feel real,” said DeVard. “And we’re seeing that people are expressing themselves with fragrance the way people express themselves with fashion. Fragrance is kind of the new fashion.”

In addition to JoJo, Nose Dive guests will include the likes of perfume writer and “The House of Beauty” author Arabelle Sicardi, and stylist and editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. The curation of guests and topics reflects the cultural conversations around fragrance that Devard said tend to perform well with Refinery29’s audience, rather than just product recommendations. 

“For Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, she’s someone who’s a cultural tastemaker and someone who travels a lot. So we were able to talk about things like fragrance on planes and the etiquette there,” said DeVard. “But we also talked about her experiences in Paris and Milan and London as a fashion editor and, very often, the only Black woman in the room. And she talked about how important it is to take up space when you are the only Black woman in the room, and how fragrance allows her to take up space.” 

Though scent has long since been a part of Eos’ products, it’s a fairly new player as a full-fledged fragrance brand. The brand first hit the market in 2007 and was perhaps best known to millennial consumers for its spherical, scented lip balms. Eos expanded to body care in 2020 and launched fragranced body mists in December 2025. 

But even less than a year after its foray into fragrance, Eos wants to establish itself as a leader in the increasingly competitive category. Kang said that, according to NielsenIQ data, Eos is already the No. 1 body mist brand across the food, drug and mass channels. 

“Fragrance equity is something we really aim to own, and we believe that we have a right to own it as a brand within this space, even from when we launched,” said Kang.

Eos has good reason to want to own more of the market: Mass fragrance remains one of beauty’s biggest sales drivers. According to data from market analysts Circana, mass market fragrance was the fastest-growing beauty category by U.S. retail sales in the first half of 2026. Some of that growth stemmed from rising prices, however; according to Circana, while dollar sales of mass fragrance grew 15%, units sold rose just 7%.

Eos is not the first brand to turn to podcasts to boost its cultural relevance. In 2025, L’Oréal Groupe launched the “This Is Not a Beauty Podcast” in collaboration with the New York Times and hosted by Isabella Rossellini, while Milani Cosmetics sponsored Fat Mascara’s return to the airwaves in March. 

Today’s beauty brands want their names and products embedded in content itself, rather than just inserted in the middle of an episode as a traditional ad spot. And sponsored podcast series and immersive events offer crucial revenue avenues for publications that have lost readership to social media platforms and the growing “click-free” economy.     

The challenge for brands and publishers then is to make what is ostensibly branded content feel as engaging as organic storytelling. While Eos will use the Nose Dive podcast to leverage new product launches, Devard said Eos allowed Refinery29 the “freedom” to talk about fragrance in a more holistic sense. 

“In these deep dive conversations where you’re getting into people’s personal histories, you’re just getting so much, so it doesn’t feel like you are being sold to at any point,” she said. “I think podcasting specifically really lends itself to [this format] because you have this hour-long space to go deep with someone. And, yes, it’s presented by a sponsor, but the breadth and depth of the interview goes so beyond that.”

Eos is not abandoning traditional advertising — the brand mounted a Super Bowl ad in February — but a podcast like Nose Dive offers what Kang hopes will be a more “seamless” integration into the conversation, rather than an intrusive ad. 

“Today’s consumer, their attention is so fragmented. The old days of ‘I just do TV ads’ are sort of over, and we have to work that much harder to cut through,” she said. “We want to be part of culture, but in a way that feels seamless.”