Sheryl
Watson

She didn't come here
to be a model.

Sheryl Watson is twenty-three years old, lives in a studio apartment fourteen minutes from the UCLA campus, and is in the middle of the most demanding stretch of her pre-med studies. She sleeps five hours a night. She runs four miles every morning before her first lecture. She has a three-inch stack of MCAT flashcards on her nightstand and a bottle of EVE on her bathroom counter.

She is not a model. She will tell you that immediately, without prompting, and with a half-laugh that suggests she finds the entire premise of this conversation slightly absurd. And yet here she is — on the cover of LUXE.

That email went to morphfragrance.com. She had discovered EVE through a friend who played volleyball at USC — someone who, like Sheryl, had a quiet obsession with fragrance and an even quieter disdain for the way most brands talked about it.

“Every perfume ad I ever saw was trying to sell me a fantasy I didn’t recognize,” she says. “EVE was the first thing that just smelled like something I’d actually wear to an 8 a.m. organic chemistry lecture and still feel like myself.”

The weakness she
won’t hide.

There is a cigarette in two of the four photographs from this shoot. Sheryl did not ask for them to be removed. She did not ask for them to be included, either. They were simply there, the way they are in her life — present, persistent, and something she is actively trying to change.

“It’s the dumbest thing I do,” she says, and the lightness disappears from her voice for the first time. “I’m studying to be a doctor. I know exactly what it does. I can describe the cellular mechanism of how it’s killing me in clinical detail. And I still do it.”

She started at nineteen, during her first set of finals. A friend handed her one outside the library. She never intended for it to become a habit. She intends for it to stop.

LUXE made no editorial request either way. The images are presented as they were taken. That was the agreement.

Athletes, not actors.

Ask Sheryl Watson what she does when she’s not studying and the answer comes fast: “I watch sports. Obsessively.”

She grew up in Bakersfield watching football with her father every Sunday. She can tell you the 2019 NFL draft order from memory. She played club soccer through high school and still runs a women’s fantasy football league with eleven friends scattered across four universities.

“I’ve always been drawn to athletes,” she says — then pauses, then laughs. “Not like that. I mean — okay, also like that. But what I mean is the discipline. The way they train for something they might fail at in front of millions of people. That’s what med school feels like, except nobody’s watching.”

She keeps a framed Kobe Bryant quote above her desk that reads: “Everything negative — pressure, challenges — is all an opportunity for me to rise.” She says she reads it before every exam.

Why EVE.

Sheryl Watson did not receive EVE as a gift. She was not sent a sample. She was not recruited for this cover. She received a sample of EVE through a teammate’s older sister who had a connection to morphfragrance.com, wore it for three weeks, and then sent an unsolicited email to the House at 2:14 a.m. on a Tuesday.

“I don’t endorse things,” she says. “I don’t have a platform. I have 400 Instagram followers and most of them are family. Someone handed me a sample and I genuinely loved how it smelled. I just wanted to tell somebody.”

When LUXE reached back and asked if she’d be willing to appear in the magazine, she assumed it was spam.

An honor she
didn’t expect.

Sheryl Watson does not consider herself a public figure. She does not consider herself photogenic. She considers herself a student who is trying to get into medical school, who happens to have good taste in fragrance and a habit she’s working on quitting.

Being on the cover of LUXE is, in her words, “the most surreal thing that has ever happened to me, and I once fainted during a cadaver lab, so the bar was already pretty high.”

She means it as a joke. But when she says the word honor, she means it the other way.