We brought you a first look at Lady Gaga’s new Fame fragrance direct from the singer’s own Twitter feed last month. Now Gaga and her partners at Coty are dishing out more details about their blockbuster of a fragrance project.

‘Absolutely everything about this launch is innovative, from the bottle, to the juice, to the lady herself,’ Coty Inc CEO Bernd Beetz told WWD. ‘She’s zeitgeist in a bottle.’

That innovation begins with the colour of the fragrance—it’s black in the bottle, but becomes clear once it’s airborne and is invisible on the skin. You know, like the nature of fame.

‘It is the first-ever black eau de parfum and we use language like “black like the soul of fame but invisible once airborne,” which makes the fragrance an allusion to the dark side of fame, the price of fame and the narcissism of fame,’ Steve Mormoris, senior vice president of global marketing for Coty Beauty, told the paper. ‘The soul of fame being black was the intellectual foundation of the color of the fragrance.’

Creating the black liquid posed technical challenges for the Coty team, as did Gaga’s strict requirements for the scent itself. Rather than top, middle and bottom notes, the fragrance ‘has a trampoline structure,’ Mormoris said, meaning that the scent will smell different on individual wearers.

Gaga worked on the bottle design with photographer Nick Knight. The heavy glass bottle has a shape inspired by one of Gaga’s most memorable appearances—remember that time she emerged from an egg at the Grammy Awards?—and is topped with a claw-like cap.

So what does it smell like? Not ‘blood and semen’, as Gaga suggested when word of the fragrance collaboration broke in November 2011. Instead, the fragrance is ‘a fruity floral focused around belladonna,’ Coty said.

‘Lady Gaga talks about how her music has a sweet center and a dark shell and a lot of her music has refrains that have a rough passage that go toward a sweet-spot melody in the middle,’ Mormoris said. ‘She referenced that a lot and we tried to capture this type of duality in the fragrance’.

We’ll know more about the scent when Gaga completes rounds of promotional activity next month, capped by a party at New York’s Guggenheim Museum on 13 September. ‘There will be theatre,’ Coty Beauty President Renato Semerari said. ‘She’s not the kind of person who just shows up and says hello.’

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