Let’s all give Taylor Johnson a warm welcome and learn more about her connection to Orange Gelée below.
Meet Taylor JohnsonTaylor resides in the Pacific Northwest but grew up in Massachusetts and is a beach gal through and through. She wears white linen year-round, drinks from a “Nantucket” coffee mug, and has a daughter named Wave. With her love of the ocean, it’s unsurprising that the first time Taylor tried the original Orange Gelée was not at a pool, but on a beach outing with her mom when she was 10 or 11.
“One of my mom’s friends was a woman named Marianne, and she was the coolest. She always wore Orange Gelée and had the aluminum tube in her beach bag,” says Taylor. “One day, I went up to her and said, ‘You smell so good, what are you wearing?’ and she took out a little tube. She let me put some on, and then I saved my allowance and went out and bought one.” The rest was history — Taylor has been wearing Orange Gelée ever since. “It’s what people associate with me. It's my signature scent,” she says.
Taylor describes the original Orange Gelée as one of her “little pleasures” and says it has been present in every important moment of her life (including when Wave was born!). “I wore it like I wear perfume,” she says. Taylor has even worn Orange Gelée in the South of France, aka its birthplace! A former entertainment journalist, Taylor has fond memories of attending Cannes, interviewing celebrities during the day, and yacht-hopping until the early morning hours. “The sun would barely be coming up, and the shopkeepers would have their handmade brooms, dusting off the dirt in front of their stores. You'd smell the espresso, the salt air, the night-blooming jasmine. The women would walk on the sand in their gowns…that was Cannes to me. And I always wore Orange Gelée, so that and those smells in the Mediterranean — it’s all tied together for me,” she says.
When Taylor learned that the original Orange Gelée was discontinued, she called every store she thought might still have it in stock, from shops back home in Massachusetts to places in Hawaii, with no luck. (At one point, she even looked into buying the company to get the formula herself!) Later, when Taylor heard that Vacation® was reimagining the cult-favorite sunscreen, she knew she had to be involved. “I sent a love letter,” she says. “I was like, What can I do? What can I share with you? How can I help? It made me so happy.”
Stay tuned for our next update, which will discuss the SPF in Orange Gelée by Vacation®!
