A beauty writer built a clean scent brand.

Ellis Brooklyn is a lesson in clean fragrance with a soft, modern face. Founded in 2015 by Bee Shapiro — a former attorney and longtime New York Times beauty columnist — it makes clean, sustainable, higher-safety-standard fine fragrance (plus body and candles). The name combines her daughter’s name, Ellis, with the Brooklyn borough where she lived. Its heroes are Myth (a jasmine-orchid flagship) and Salt.

The design is clean, minimalist and pastel: simple, elegant bottles with soft pastel colour-coding per scent, and recyclable, sustainable packaging (it’s also PETA-certified vegan). It feels modern, soft and considered — clean beauty without clinical coldness.

(Honest notes: Ellis Brooklyn is independent but venture-backed (a 2023 Series A led by REDO Ventures) — not acquired. And, tellingly, the brand has stepped back from the word “clean” — it now emphasises transparency and high safety standards (using both natural and synthetic materials, IFRA-compliant) rather than the unregulated “clean” label. No official brand hex is published — the palette is soft pastels, one per scent.)

Ellis Brooklyn lives in soft pastels. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

Ellis Brooklyn’s identity is soft, clean and modern — a soft blue, a blush, a mint, a cream, and an ink. Rather than one house colour, it uses soft pastel colour-coding per scent — a gentle, modern palette that reads as clean and considered. It signals soft, sustainable, modern fragrance rather than opulence or loudness. The honest caveat: with no published brand hex, these tones are an original, unofficial interpretation, not first-party values.

The lesson is soft pastels read as clean and modern. Ellis Brooklyn’s world is a calm, pastel shelf. For designers, it is a reminder that a soft pastel palette — a different gentle tone per scent — plus clean minimalism can make a product feel modern, sustainable and considered without going cold or clinical. The takeaways: use soft pastels for a clean-but-warm feel; colour-code per scent; and treat any single hex as unofficial — using a muted slate for small text so the pastels stay soft.

The wordmark spirit is a clean sans — soft and modern.

Ellis Brooklyn’s identity carries a soft, modern, considered spirit — a restrained wordmark over soft pastels. A clean, gentle sans captures the mood: it is modern and unfussy, the register of a soft clean-fragrance brand. Set against soft pastels, the clean sans feels soft and modern — exactly the considered personality Ellis Brooklyn carries. It is gentle rather than loud, mirroring a calm, sustainable world. (Ellis Brooklyn’s real wordmark and bottles are trademarks and trade dress we describe but do not reproduce, and the exact typeface is not published, so we don’t assert it.) Because the specific mark is not ours to use, the honest description is “a clean sans spirit,” not the Ellis Brooklyn logo. The type behaves like the brand: soft, modern and considered.

Ellis Brooklyn stands for considered clean fragrance.

Ellis Brooklyn is a lesson in softness with substance. Soft pastels and clean minimalism make it feel modern and gentle, while genuine sustainability (recyclable packaging, PETA-vegan) and a shift from “clean” to “transparency” give it substance. The softness is a surface over real standards. The differentiator is soft, modern design backed by transparency.

For designers and brand-builders, Ellis Brooklyn offers a clear takeaway: a soft palette can carry a serious position. The lessons: use soft pastels for a modern, approachable feel; colour-code per scent; and back the look with real substance (sustainability, transparency). It is also a reminder to stay accurate: Ellis Brooklyn is venture-backed but independent, and it now favours “transparency” over the unregulated word “clean” — with the palette here an unofficial interpretation. Ellis Brooklyn made clean feel soft — proof that softness plus substance can be the difference.

Keep Ellis Brooklyn’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.