Weeks before the August launch, Ice Spice sat in front of a phone camera and sold perfume. The venue was a TikTok Shop LIVE run with Ulta Beauty, and she was the retailer’s first celebrity co-host. Revlon later put numbers on it: 178,000 total views and close to 6 million impressions, which the company called one of the highest concurrent viewership totals for a TikTok Shop LIVE to date. It looked like a founder launching her own thing.
Then there’s the fine print of the Ice Spice Revlon fragrance deal, the line at the bottom of the press release that nobody quotes: “In Ha Mood is a trademark owned by Revlon Consumer Products LLC and is used under license.” Scroll a little further and the About Revlon boilerplate lists the company’s brands. Juicy Couture. Elizabeth Taylor. Christina Aguilera. And now, sitting in that same list, Ice Spice.
She doesn’t own it. That isn’t a scandal, and it isn’t an accident. It’s a specific deal structure with specific economics, and for an artist at her stage it may be the smartest one available. In Ha Mood is a prestige eau de parfum created under a global fragrance licensing agreement between Ice Spice and Revlon Consumer Products LLC, sold exclusively through Ulta Beauty in three sizes priced from $28 to $79. Understanding what that sentence actually means is the difference between reading a launch and reading a business.
Last updated: August 2026
Quick answers
Is In Ha Mood a licensing deal? Yes. Revlon announced it on May 14, 2025 as a global fragrance licensing deal, and the product trademark is owned by Revlon Consumer Products LLC and used under license. Revlon develops, manufactures, distributes and markets the fragrance. Ice Spice licenses her name and creative input in exchange for royalties.
How much does In Ha Mood by Ice Spice cost? In Ha Mood comes in three sizes: 0.33 fl oz for $28, 1.0 fl oz for $58, and 3.4 fl oz for $79. Revlon notes that sizes and pricing are subject to availability by retailer, so individual Ulta locations may carry a narrower range.
Where can you buy Ice Spice’s fragrance? In Ha Mood is exclusive to Ulta Beauty. It went live on Ulta.com and Ulta Beauty’s TikTok Shop on August 19, 2026, followed by in-store availability across the United States starting August 23, 2026. There is no third-party retail distribution.
What is In Ha Mood and what does it cost?
In Ha Mood is Ice Spice’s first fragrance, a prestige eau de parfum priced from $28 to $79 and sold only through Ulta Beauty. Revlon describes it as a floral fruity amber, built around what the company calls a Queen Royale Accord, a berry fizz blend named for Ice Spice and layered with pear and wild raspberry. Rose, plum blossom and magnolia sit at the heart. Vanilla absolute, magenta moss and amber close it out.
Three perfumers worked on it: Adriana Medina, Christine Hassan and Carine Certain Boin. The bottle is soft pink with a sculptural silhouette, a bow at the neck shaped like a butterfly, and an emerald cut cap. The name comes from her 2023 single, one of the tracks that carried her breakout EP.
The pricing tells you where Revlon positioned it. At $79 for the largest size, In Ha Mood sits in prestige territory, above drugstore celebrity scents but well below designer houses. That ladder matters, because a $28 entry size is an impulse buy for a teenager with a gift card, and the $58 middle size is where most fragrance volume actually lives.
Is In Ha Mood a licensing deal?
Yes, and Revlon said so in the headline. The May 14, 2025 announcement was titled “Revlon Signs Global Fragrance Licensing Deal with Superstar Musician Ice Spice.” The body called it a “global strategic licensing deal” and said Ice Spice “will partner with Revlon’s experts to develop a bespoke fragrance line.”
In a fragrance license, the celebrity contributes name, likeness, creative direction and promotion. The licensee contributes everything else: formulation, packaging design, manufacturing, regulatory work, retail negotiation, inventory, advertising spend and the entire profit and loss statement. Revlon owns the resulting brand asset. Ice Spice gets paid on the revenue it generates.
The clearest evidence is in Revlon’s own corporate language. The August 19, 2026 launch release carries the trademark notice, and the About Revlon section now lists Ice Spice as a company brand next to Juicy Couture, Elizabeth Taylor and Christina Aguilera. Companies do not list licensors that way. They list assets.
Michelle Peluso, Revlon’s CEO, framed it in exactly those terms when the deal was signed: “This deal also marks a major step in the revitalization of Revlon’s fragrance business and for the company’s ambitious growth plans.” That’s a portfolio statement, not a partnership statement.
What a celebrity fragrance license actually pays
Celebrity fragrance licenses pay a single-digit royalty on wholesale revenue, plus an upfront advance that gets recouped against future royalties. The Hollywood Reporter, writing on the economics of the category, described top celebrities with young female audiences commanding $3 million to $5 million upfront alongside a 6% or 7% royalty. Rates move with how badly each side needs the other, and as WWD has covered at length, there is no single benchmark percentage across licensing categories.
Neither Revlon nor Ice Spice has disclosed her terms, so treat any specific figure as unverified. What is verifiable is the arithmetic of the structure, and that arithmetic is unglamorous.
Royalties are almost always calculated on wholesale, not retail. A $79 bottle sold to Ulta at a typical prestige wholesale margin lands somewhere near $40 in revenue to Revlon. A 6% royalty on that is roughly $2.40 per bottle. At $58, it’s closer to $1.75. To clear $1 million in royalties on the middle size alone, the line needs to move well over half a million bottles.
Advances change the shape of the first year, not the total. An advance is a prepayment, so a celebrity who takes $3 million upfront earns nothing further until royalties exceed that number. Minimum guarantees work the other way, obligating the licensee to pay a floor whether or not the product sells, which is the single most valuable clause a licensor can negotiate.
The commission layer is real too. When Brand Sense brokered Britney Spears’ deal with Elizabeth Arden in 2004, the firm stood to collect 35% of the resulting fragrance income, and later sued for $10 million when Spears asked Arden to route royalties directly to her. Whatever Ice Spice’s headline rate is, management, legal and brokerage take a cut before she sees it.
Why Revlon needed the Ice Spice fragrance deal more than she did
Revlon spent 2025 rebuilding a fragrance business, and Ice Spice was the opening move. The company signed her on May 14, then announced a licensing agreement with luxury streetwear label Palm Angels six days later on May 20. In September it renewed its long-running Christina Aguilera fragrance license, and on September 25 it named Amber Garrison president of Elizabeth Arden and its global fragrance category. Four deliberate moves in five months is a strategy, not a series of celebrity photo opportunities.
The context is that Revlon has done this before, at enormous scale, through an asset it already owns. Revlon acquired Elizabeth Arden in 2016, and Arden is the house that built Britney Spears into the most commercially successful celebrity fragrance franchise in history. An Elizabeth Arden representative described the Spears portfolio to Racked as a billion dollar fragrance franchise, and it has stayed in production for more than twenty years, outlasting the celebrity fragrance boom that produced it.
The category is also cooperating. Circana reported that U.S. prestige beauty retail sales grew 4% to $36 billion in 2025, with prestige fragrance up 5% in dollars and finishing the year as the second-largest prestige segment. Mass fragrance was the fastest-growing mass category at 15%. Growth continued into 2026, with prestige beauty up 7% to $17.1 billion in the first half.
Read against that backdrop, In Ha Mood is Revlon buying a young audience it cannot reach organically. Revlon’s own materials put Ice Spice at over 2.5 billion streams, with a following that lives on the platforms where fragrance discovery now happens. Revlon has factories, an Ulta relationship and 90-plus years of distribution. Each side was buying the thing it couldn’t build.
How the deal compares to Cardi B and Sydney Sweeney
Three structures dominate celebrity consumer brands right now, and they sit on a straight line from least risk to most upside. Ice Spice took the low-risk end. Cardi B’s Grow-Good Beauty sits in the middle as a joint venture with Revolve, where the retailer brings the commercial infrastructure and Cardi brings the product view and the audience. Sydney Sweeney’s SYRN, a lingerie label rather than a beauty line, sits at the far end: venture-funded, independently staffed, and owned by the founder.
| Structure | Example | Who funds it | Who owns the brand | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| License | Ice Spice and Revlon | The licensee, entirely | The licensee | Talent with reach but limited capital or operating time |
| Joint venture | Cardi B and Revolve | Shared, weighted to the partner | Shared entity | Talent with a defined product view and a willing operator |
| Owned brand | Sydney Sweeney and SYRN | Founder plus outside investors | The founder and cap table | Talent who can raise capital and hire operators |
| Owned brand with exit | Hailey Bieber and rhode | Founder plus investors | Founder until acquisition | Talent building toward a sale rather than an income stream |
The pattern holds outside beauty. In spirits, most celebrity tequila brands are endorsement deals, and the ones that produced generational wealth were the ones where the celebrity held equity. George Clooney had equity in Casamigos, which is why the sale made him rich rather than merely paid. Chuck Norris built a $70 million empire by taking ownership over guaranteed fees at nearly every decision point.
Why the boring deal is probably the right one
The standard take is that licensing is the loser’s move and every celebrity should be building an owned brand. That take ignores the balance sheet. Parade and other outlets put Ice Spice’s net worth at roughly $5 million in 2026, a figure built on a reported record deal, streaming income, touring and campaign work with Mercedes-Benz, SKIMS and Dunkin’. That’s a real fortune for a 26-year-old four years into a career, and it is nowhere near the capital base of the richest women in music, several of whom did fund their own brands.
Five million dollars does not fund a fragrance company. Launching an owned prestige scent means paying for juice development, glass tooling, filling, regulatory compliance, inventory produced months ahead of demand, retail slotting and a marketing budget large enough to be noticed. Sydney Sweeney did not self-fund SYRN either. She raised outside capital and hired a team, which is a different sport with different entry requirements.
There’s also a survivorship problem in how this category gets discussed. Celebrity fragrance has a long record of expensive failures, and the licensing structure is what protects the artist from them. If In Ha Mood underperforms, Revlon eats the unsold inventory, the write-downs and the media spend. Ice Spice keeps her advance and her name. If it works, she collects royalties on a franchise she never had to capitalize.
That asymmetry is the whole point. She is 26, in the middle of a music career that demands touring and recording, and fragrance is a category where operating badly destroys the brand equity that made the deal possible. Licensing rents out the name and keeps the day job. It’s not the maximum-upside choice. It might be the correct one.
The real risk isn’t the structure, it’s the duration. Licensing deals are finite, and a fragrance license that expires leaves the artist with no asset and a trademark sitting on someone else’s ledger. The version of this that ages well is the one where the license is the first deal, not the only one, and where the terms leave room to build something owned later.
Where can you buy Ice Spice’s fragrance?
In Ha Mood is available exclusively through Ulta Beauty. It launched on Ulta.com and Ulta Beauty’s TikTok Shop on August 19, 2026, with in-store availability across the United States beginning August 23. There is no distribution through Sephora, Amazon or department stores.
The retail path was as engineered as the product. Revlon and Ulta ran a limited-time drop on Ulta’s TikTok Shop in late July, ahead of the national launch, and In Ha Mood became the first new brand ever launched through that channel. Ice Spice co-hosted the live stream, the first celebrity to do so for the retailer, and Revlon put the result at 178,000 total views and nearly 6 million impressions.
Linda Suliafu, vice president of merchandising at Ulta Beauty, described the reasoning plainly: the social-first debut “tapped directly into how our guests discover, share, and shape beauty trends today.” Exclusivity is the trade. Ulta gets a product nobody else can sell and a reason for a young shopper to open the app. Revlon gets guaranteed shelf placement and a merchandising partner with an incentive to make the launch work.
What founders should take from this
The useful lesson isn’t that licensing is good or bad. It’s that the right structure depends on which resource you’re short of, and most people pick based on ego instead.
Four things worth copying. First, match the structure to your capital position, not your ambition: if you can’t fund inventory and a marketing budget through a bad first year, a license transfers that risk to someone who can. Second, negotiate the minimum guarantee harder than the royalty rate, because a floor you get paid regardless beats a percentage of a number nobody can promise. Third, check who owns the trademark before you sign anything, since that single line determines whether you’re building an asset or renting your name. Fourth, treat the exclusive retail partner as part of the deal, because a single retailer with skin in the game will merchandise you better than five who don’t care. Ulta Beauty gave In Ha Mood a TikTok Shop first and a national in-store rollout inside four days, which is not what a non-exclusive account does for a new brand.
Ice Spice made a defensible choice with the resources she had, and Revlon made an obvious one with the resources it had. The artists who end up owning something usually start exactly here, with a license that pays for the education and buys time to build the thing they actually keep. Whether In Ha Mood becomes that first step or the whole story depends less on how the fragrance sells and more on what she signs next.
