Emily Ratajkowski Joins Viktor & Rolf as Face of Flowerbomb — Reveals Her Favorite Scent on a Man

Emily Ratajkowski's new gig is pure icon behavior.

The model and author joins the Viktor & Rolf family as the face of the brand's most iconic fragrance, Flowerbomb. And "Iconic" is exactly how Ratajkowski would describe the sweet, floral scent.

"I feel like my 60-year-old aunt knows it, but so does my 12-year-old cousin," she says. "Flowerbomb is a fragrance everybody knows. I grew up knowing it."

Flowerbomb, which has notes of freesia, jasmine, patchouli, vanilla and more, is what Ratajkowski considers to be an ultra-wearable fragrance because it's not "overly sweet" but still feels "punchy."

"It's feminine without being too delicate," Ratajkowski, 31, adds of the fragrance.

The model stars in Viktor & Rolf's newest campaign, shot by industry powerhouses Inez & Vinoodh, wearing two different looks that evoke the floral femininity of the fragrance. In one set of photos, she wears a light pink and white collared shirt with black briefs, and in the others, she wears a jewel-encrusted bustier with voluminous white skirt.

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Like many, Ratajkowski has strong memories tied to scent — whether it's remembering how her mother taught her to put perfume on for a night out or the scent of crashing waves in her hometown of San Diego.

"I'm thinking about the house I grew up in," she says while imagining some of her favorite scents and recalling the smell of wet grass and eucalyptus trees. "The sprinklers would go off in the morning before school. It's just so crazy how memory is so attached to scent."

Growing up, Ratajkowski settled into a scent routine influenced by her surroundings. She wore popular, sweet fragrances in middle school to deal with her changing body — "Puberty, man." — and inherited her mom's instructions for how to wear it.

"My mom always wore fragrance when she was getting ready to go out, and she taught me how to do it," she says. "You spray one wrist, then you rub them together, and then you hit the neck. So I've just always done it that way."

Though there were times when she'd "douse" herself as a teenager, she now believes in the minimalistic approach to fragrance. It's also an approach that she wishes more men would take.

"Oh my god. Men. I really don't like scent on men," the High Low podcast host says with a laugh, adding that so often they're heavy-handed with their scents and they all smell the same.

"I like them to smell like themselves," she says. "I say that and maybe I'll live to regret it, but I like the smell. I like pheromones. I like getting a sense of somebody based on their smell."

As she's grown older, Ratajkowski's tastes have changed, and she no longer reaches for anything too sweet. Of her preference now, she answers simply, "Hello, Flowerbomb!" She's a fan of delicate florals, which stems from her love of having fresh flowers around the house.

Flowerbomb is Viktor & Rolf's signature scent that has gotten a handful of variations over the years, including Flowerbomb Ruby Orchid and Flowerbomb Dew. The original, though, created by perfumers Olivier Polge, Carlos Benaim and Domitille Berthier, has stood the test of time for more than a decade now. Available in five different bottle sizes — from .67 oz. to 5 oz. — the fragrance is long-lasting and will surround you in florals throughout your day.

"It gets better as the day goes on," Ratajkowski gushes, adding that the patchouli note is her favorite.

Fragrance is just one piece of Ratajkowski's beauty routine, though. Just like her fragrance routine has changed as she's gotten older, so has her beauty routine. She admits she takes better care of her skin than she did as a budding model and has learned what type of makeup tricks work for her face shape.

"My placement of blush is very specific," she says. "I do inner cheek and then across the nose, so it looks like I got a sunburn."

She tells PEOPLE that she also draws on freckles and darkens a mole on her face to draw attention to it. The last piece of her signature look is her cat eye.

"Those are just things that look good on my face though, that I'm not sure they would look good on everyone," she says. "There are also things that I've learned look really bad [on me]. Blush up high on me doesn't look good. So you kind of have to figure out what works for you."

Something else Ratajkowski has learned about herself is that red carpets stress her out. She may step foot onto a carpet looking glamorous, but she says that the process is far from easy. The My Body author says she spends too much time overanalyzing what she's wearing, so she much prefers her day-to-day looks instead.

"Red carpets are like, 'What are other people going to be wearing?' And, 'Is this too similar to my last look?'" she says. "I feel like it's harder to express yourself as much too, because it is typically a little bit more formal."

Red carpets, however, are part of Ratajkowski's job, and she admits that there have been plenty of times she's looked back on an event and been really pleased with how everything turned out. Part of the process of psyching herself up for what she knows to be a stressful night is doing her own glam. "That's what I've been doing a lot more recently — my own hair and makeup. Even if somebody's styling me, I still have that time to myself to feel like myself."