Candlelight
- Rose
- Aug 4
- 3 min read
Last summer I was blessed to collaborate with some enchanting muses I call friends. We created this short film inspired by the perfume Candlelight, which was the second offering in the Eros Rose Perfume line.
It all started with my friend Hannah ordering samples of the line. We had a wonderful text exchange about the perfumes and their characteristics. She was most taken with Candlelight and kindly offered to make a short film inspired by it. One thing I was really struck by was her thinking of Candlelight as the narrator of the full line. The image of Someone sitting in an old library surrounded by books and reading about the collection of perfumes all lit up by candlelight! Delilah, my friend who modeled for the project and was muse extraordinaire had been wearing Candlelight for a couple years by then. She shared the most beautiful and meaningful insights she felt about the perfume. She felt it carried some special kind of strength that had been passed down from women to women for centuries.
Candlelight was originally inspired by my desire to create a Chpyre perfume. It’s a vintage style of fragrance first created in the early 1900’s with a classic structure of oakmoss, bergamote and labdanum. Coty created this original mixture and it sparked a whole style of perfume with this core structure plus other notes built around it by individual perfumers. Interestingly, perfumes had been called Chypre (Cypress) on and off since the ancient world. Often perfumes were named after their land of origin in ancient times. Cypress, which chypre means in French, was a huge hub for perfumes in antiquity and rightly so in being the birthplace of the goddess of perfume, Aphrodite.
For my chypre I added notes of rose and frankincense around the classic ingredients and when I was done I was struck by the fact that it smelled like candlelight. True, it has a beeswax quality to it, but more than anything it created a fantasy smell for me of a candle's flame. This all just popped into my head when I inhaled it for the first time so the name was born… Candlelight. It ended up really representing light and dark, courage and strength for me. The beacon in darkness beckoning one forward.
As time went on the scene of cypress and Aphrodite really started to take shape. The rose is her sacred flower and it’s woven throughout the fragrance. I see a deep dark rose, perhaps even dried rose petals. The moss took the form of a dark shaded forest with deep cool shadows of mystery calling one deeper into the woods. The bergamote became sun beams falling through the air creating dappled beauty on the forest floor.
With all three of our associations Hannah, Delilah and I met. in such perfect harmony, I can’t quite describe the magic of that collaboration. We all fed into each other and there was this perfect flow of inspiration with one idea weaving into the next. We embraced a theme of magic in the shoot paying homage to the fun and unexpected fact that many witches had fallen in love with this perfume. We wanted to incorporate potion-making, studying, reflection and the spell of life itself. I won’t lie, Eros and Aphrodite appeared that day and added many layers of sensuality that hadn’t originally been in the plot but one can’t resist such forces.
I hope you all enjoy what we created!
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