Ashes of me,
Whirl in the fires I may not name.
Lick, lovely flame!

— Leonora Speyer

“This is the strangest year ever,” we find ourselves saying yet again. And it’s no less true than it was last year, or the year before! Turning our homes and our laboratory inside out, we whirl in the fires we may not name. Lick, lovely flame!

There’s always a sense of homecoming in these seasonal fragrance releases, presenting opportunities to reconnect with a feeling, a person, a memory, a tradition. These tiny bottles contain the essence of an experience you may share with someone across vast distances in space and time. Or you may keep it to yourself, reuniting with something playful or painful (or somehow both), glowing from within.

That was the inspiration for this collection’s video announcement, which features two little kindred spirits nicknamed Heloise and Abelard. They were found tangled together at a flea market, sold by a vendor who speculated that they’d been traveling together for quite a long time. Did they run away together? Had they ever been apart? It was oddly moving to restore the pair so they could dance again, wondering how long they must have been waiting to do so.

This year, Halloween finds us curiously suspended between the past and the future, comforted by memories and fantasies in the face of all that remains unknown. The strings that have kept our little world in motion for so long are all being cut, measured, restrung. It’s a thrilling, uncomfortable, hopeful process. Is that something we can bottle? Is it something that deserves to be shared?

We’ve done our best, and one day it will be quite interesting to look back at this particular season, to open our own little bottles and retrace the steps back to this special moment when the possibility of celebration and reunion still seemed far out of reach, and yet we reached out anyway — toward you, our friends, fans, and well-wishers, and also toward the uncanny, unknowable future where magic undeniably awaits.

Will you meet us there, sometime, for a dance? In the meantime, please enjoy these ashes of us, produced by the licking of such lovely flames.