Blige, 39, spoke to Women’s Wear Daily while on the set as she shot the ad campaign for My Life, her new fragrance with Carol’s Daughter, aptly named after her 1994 best-selling second album.

“I wanted my fragrance to be something special for my female fans,” says Blige. “I was crying out for help [during the time of the recording] because I was going through so much. And four million women said, ‘Mary, we’re going through it, too, but you’re helping us by calling on us.’ From that day on, I began speaking truths about my life, and about their lives, and everything around us. So it’s a special tribute to us as women.

“My fans and I are smart now. We know we’re smart now, but we didn’t know it then. We know we’re beautiful now, we didn’t know it then. We’re educated now, we didn’t know it then. We’re soft, we’re edgy—we’re all those things. And I wanted this perfume to represent every female’s everyday life.”

About developing the fragrance, she says: “I’ve never done it, but it was so much fun because I have a keen sense of smell. I knew exactly what I wanted and would ask for an incense smell, a musk smell, a wood smell. I also wanted florals, but edgy florals. Every day they would bring me blotters to test—after a while, everything started to smell the same, so I had to pull back.”