Stella- the scent of one woman

NEW YORK -- Stella McCartney lives by pretty strict rules: She doesn't eat meat, she won't gossip about her famous friends, who include Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow, and she won't work with leather or fur -- not an easy feat in the fashion world.

Now that she's launching her own signature fragrance, she has made a few additions to her principled list. Stella, developed with YSL Beaute, is made from only organic active ingredients, it doesn't use genetically modified crop raw materials, and the perfume and accompanying body products were not tested on animals.

McCartney says she's not sure if these rules have helped or hindered her career, but they've made her what she is today.

But since it's her name sewn into the label of that cashmere coat and etched into the perfume bottle, McCartney says her work is very personal.

"What really inspires me is me. ... I try to bring out the friction of my sexy feminine side and the masculine powerful side. It's how I try to act and then portray in my work," she says.

Instead of trading on her famous name -- "McCartney" as in daughter of Paul -- and presumably a family fortune to launch a trendy, quick-sell teen line when she felt a calling to fashion, McCartney decided to learn the craft of master tailoring on Saville Row in London while also taking design classes at Central Saint Martins College in the early 1990s.

When she struck the Gucci deal in 2001 to do her own name-brand collection, she did it on the condition that she'd have complete creative control. "I don't just want to be the face of a megabrand," she says.