Hexennacht

I'm Caroline Blicq. I've been making Hexennacht out of my home-based workshop for fifteen years — perfume oils, hand-dipped incense, and a floor wash I use myself.

I grew up on the Canadian prairies and started paying attention to plants there, in my Grammie's garden, amongst the balsam poplars, in the saskatoon berry patches. Then a long stretch in the Pacific Northwest (where everything is wet and smells like petrichor, evergreen, and wet pavement) and some years in Santa Barbara learning the coastal chaparral. Now I'm outside Phoenix, where it hits 118 and the creosote goes off like a chemical plant the second it rains. I foraged, infused, and bottled that one. It's on the products page.

I work alone. I blend, pour, label, photograph, pack, and drive everything to the post office myself. It's been that way since the beginning. Four rescue cats supervise poorly.

Almost everything is vegan. The exceptions: Babooshka and Milk & Honey contain beeswax absolute. Eternal Sunshine contains choya nakh, made from operculum — the hard "door" a sea snail seals itself behind. Purr contains wool absolute, upcycled from wool shorn off pasture-reared New Zealand sheep; no sheep or lambs are harmed, but it's still animal-produced, so still not vegan.

Nothing is tested on animals, ever (excluding myself).

I'm interested in (and in creating) scents that are strange and a little off — the kind that put you in a specific room you can't quite place.