“Sweet, sweet burn of sun and summer wind, and you my friend, my new fun thing, my summer fling.”

Summer Fling - k.d lang

Gather round, dear readers, for I am going to tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was a girl who worked in an office without windows. It was a dreary grey office in a dreary grey building, and all day long she filed dreary invoices and answered dreary phone calls. And the girl knew this was not the life for her, or for anyone. She knew, deep down in her bones, that the world was not dreary and grey. She knew the world was gentle sunshine and the whisper of salt winds through sand dunes. She knew the world was the scent of brine in the air and the sticky-sweet taste of candy floss melting on the tongue. She knew the world was the lights of the fairground at dusk, the music of the carousel and the rush of water on sand. 

So in her head, while she filed her invoices and answered her phone calls, she ran down to the ocean and pushed her bare toes in the wet sand. She picked up glistening seashells and watched crabs pick their way through tangles of seaweed. She watched gulls wheel over the waters, soaring off to places far away and dream-filled. She imagined mermaids and krakens and underwater cities bejewelled with coral and pearls. And she knew this was the life for her. So she wrote poems and stories and made perfumes, and she filled them all with the sea and its treasures. And she dreamed and she hoped and she waited. Because one day she was going to walk out of that dreary grey office and run down to the sea for real.

Seven|ElevenStudios

And I'm still waiting. It's been my life's dream to live by the sea. I love the British coastline - from the wild mountains and crashing grey waves of Northumberland to the long sandy stretches of Norfolk's beaches. The scents, the sounds, the scenery...it's just the most perfect combination for me. I love to sit and watch the ocean. I love walking along the shore barefoot, picking up seashells, trying (and failing) to skim stones. I love paddling in rock pools and finding strange fish and sea glass. I love sitting at the end of the pier, ice cream in hand, watching people come and go, inhaling the smells of sun tan lotion and frying donuts. That, for me, is the only thing to strive for. A life at the edge of the ocean.

All through my childhood, and still today, my grandparents have had a holiday home or caravan on the Norfolk coast. My summer memories are full of the fairground at Hunstanton - the safe scares of the ghost train, the stomach-churning thrill of the waltzer, the sticks of rock, and the endless flavours of ice cream. The cool haven of the sealife centre, filled with starfish and sharks. Tacky tourist gifts like sea lion keyrings and novelty sunhats. The long walk down the pier with the sea on one side and row after row of tiny, inviting gift shops offering everything from tumbled amethyst to bags of jelly beans.

When I go back there as an adult, I feel joyous and content, and I still want to do all the things I did there as a child. Splash in the waves, scoop up the starfish for just a brief moment, try that rum and raisin ice cream, collect those seashells. There's nowhere as magical as the seaside for me, nowhere I feel more at home. And one day, I will have my house by the sea.

In the mean time, I write stories about selkies and make perfumes filled with the scents of my childhood summers. I'm going to give you the ocean and the fairground, all that sugar-rich confectionery, all that briney tang and golden sunshine. I'm working on a collection of summer scents right now that are really helping lift that sense of dreary greyness that's sometimes so hard to see past. I hope, when they're released in the very near future, you'll get a glimpse of that magical seaside summer I love so much. And if you want to share your own summer memories - please do! Tell your own story :)

Chris Miles

"Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards...

...I got a full house and four people died." - Steven Wright.

When I decided I was going to open an Etsy shop I knew two things would hold me back: labels for my perfumes and photos for my products. Luckily I have a talented artist friend who took care of the former for me; unluckily the latter was all in my hands. And I'm not a photographer. Oh no. I spent hours trying to figure out how to make the most of my limited resources, hours reading advice forums for Etsy sellers. Props! No props! White backgrounds! Grain wood backgrounds! Clip art! Stock images! Nothing was right, though. None of the traditional ideas and tips worked for me, not just because my skills as a photographer/photo editor are limited, but because those styles of presentation didn't speak to me. I didn't feel like my personality and voice would shine through.

And then I had a brainwave: Aleister Crowley. Well, his Thoth Tarot deck, to be precise:

So let's go back a bit. I started reading Tarot cards when I was a first-year student at University in Liverpool. It was something I'd wanted to learn to do for...forever...but for various reasons I never had. But early on in my student days I found an amazing little indie bookshop that sold (along with various text books I needed) a small selection of Tarot decks. And there was me with my student loan and no sense of responsibility! I bought my first deck - the Tarot of a Moon Garden - and I taught myself to read the cards. 

Over the years I've done less and less Tarot reading, but more and more Tarot collecting. I just love how many different spins you can put on the traditional symbols - I've got everything from the Necronomicon Tarot to the Unicorn Tarot, and for the most part nowadays, they're all just gathered in a drawer under the snake tanks, hidden away from the world unless I feel a need to pull them out and admire them.

So, the Crowley Thoth Tarot! This was an early addition to my collection, both because of the unusual artwork and the historical context of the deck. Crowley's aim was to update the traditional Rider-Waite symbolism of the Tarot by incorporating imagery from science and philosophy, as well as his own personal take on the occult. He renamed many of the major arcana (Justice became Adjustment, Strength became Lust), as well as subtly adjusting the meanings of some of the minor arcana. The result is a very unique and often difficult to interpret deck, but if you're a student of the Tarot or the occult, it's worth picking up.

But none of that is why I jumped to the Crowley Thoth deck when I decided to use Tarot cards in my photos. My initial reasoning was much more mundane: they're big cards. Like, too big for me to ever get the hang of shuffling them elegantly. So that makes a great backdrop for my perfume bottles - a simple and straightforward solution for a very amateur photographer. The added bonus for me is that I really feel the use of the cards conveys that sense of "me" that I wanted. Tarot cards have been a big part of my life in one form or another for a decade now - it felt right to incorporate that love into a new one. I didn't want a homogeneous, big-brand look for my shop, either. Common Brimstone is a personal passion and I like it to have a personal touch. The cards help with that, I think.

Where I can, I've tried to use cards that can be symbolically linked to the perfume - the Death card with Grave Digger, for example - but otherwise I've chosen cards that evoke the same mood or feeling in me that the perfume does, as with Druid. When I started running out of Crowley Thoth cards that I felt were fitting, I dug back into my collection for some back-up decks. At the moment I'm slowly reworking all my photos, and the other "main" deck I'm using as backdrops now is the Tarot of the Secret Forest:

I love this deck! It manages to be both whimsical and slightly creepy, and whilst the artwork is in stark contrast to that of the Thoth deck, it has also turned out to lend itself surprisingly well to certain perfumes. This was a deck I bought purely for the art style, and like the Crowley Thoth, it subtly re-imagines the traditional Rider-Waite Tarot symbolism. I love a deck that puts a unique spin on Tarot reading - it forces you as a reader to focus harder and look deeper.

I've also got two more "backup decks" in hand for future photos - the Crystal Tarot and the Quantum Tarot. Now, the Crystal Tarot is just irresistible to me: the art work is elegant and beautiful, and it's lovely to read as well. You might recognise this image from my Lady of the Lake perfume - it's just a perfect fit!

The Quantum Tarot deck I could rave about all day (I won't, don't worry). I was a kid who hated science in school; I've grown up to be an adult (most of the time) who is fascinated by it. The Quantum Tarot is maybe the most unique deck in my collection, combining the principles of Tarot with the intricacies and mysteries of quantum physics, and throwing in some very stylish artwork as a bonus.

And if I burn through all four of these decks, you can keep an eye out for the dragon Tarot, the Sante Fe Tarot, the vampire Tarot, the Deviant Moon Tarot, the Dark Angels Tarot, and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head...

I'll admit that I was terrified that my shoddy photos were going to kill my shop before it even got started, but I do actually get quite a lot of compliments on them, even the older, crappy ones. I can only assume this is down to Aleister Crowley.