Despite the adjustment to much colder weather as we get our new facility up and running in Philadelphia, we’re warmed by the invigorating energy of so many firsts. You never forget your first Christmas in a new city! And the New Year will kick off our first complete cycle in this new home, with all the highs and lows that fortune sees fit to throw at us.

It’s a raw time, moreso than past winters. Nothing entirely comfy, nothing fully realized. We’re groping through the darkness, chasing our own starlight, in ways that are sometimes eerily reminiscent of when we first started BPAL in 2002. We are the ghosts our future selves will be haunted by, building the backdrop for their happiness and prosperity. In the meantime, we’re stuck feeling apart from so many folks we’d prefer to be closer to in the present.

It’s a raw time for other families too, other communities, others who have neither family or community. Once frozen, hearts can take an awfully long time to thaw; warmth alone won’t do it, they have to be persuaded, cajoled, reassured back into functioning. Sometimes the challenges imposed by winter weather and holiday traditions can shock the senses back to life, and the return of certain seasonal pleasures often teases us back into better spirits despite ourselves. We welcome all of it! Overwhelmed as we may be, we’re still reserving the right to be merry.

To that end, what can we Lab ghosties do but keep the oil flowing, presenting at least the possibility of comfort and joy, carefully wrapped with phantoms of memory and taped together with old stories? And what can we really say, except THANK YOU to everyone who enabled our twenty years of dream-chasing and world-building in Los Angeles, which has brought us all the way ‘round to this new beginning? (We will never be done thanking you for this.)

So this year’s long-awaited winter collection contains not just perfumes, but possibilities. Whatever your taste this time, whether it be freeze or thaw, feast or famine, soft or spiky, you’ll find plenty of moods, textures, and feelings to layer up in.

And as usual, everything that isn’t coming with us into the future ends up on the burn pile. The smoke is particularly thick and fragrant this winter! If the wind is right, you might even be able to smell it all the way over there, wherever you are. It’s a raw time, but don’t despair – we can always count on the embers of the freshly-incinerated past to keep us toasty.