Every candle has
a climate story.

Brazil lost an area the size of Panama last year. It started, as it usually does, with cattle ranchers cutting trees to clear pasture. The trees come down and in that moment the forest almost smells like you’ve just mowed the lawn. Wet foliage, broken wood, turned earth. The living scent of something enormous becoming something much smaller.

Then it sits. The cut timber dries in the sun for weeks, sometimes months. The surrounding forest dries with it — drought has seen to that. What was a rainforest becomes a tinderbox. Then someone strikes a match.

This candle is about the part before the fire — the green, alive smell of a forest that holds 1 in 10 of every species on Earth in the last moments it’s still a forest. That smell doesn’t last.

Freshly Logged Rainforest

$42 · 11 oz · Vegan coconut-soy · Limited · 100 units

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The Great Barrier Reef is one of the largest living structures on Earth. Visible from space. Home to a quarter of all marine species, packed into less than 1% of the ocean floor. It is also, right now, in the middle of the worst bleaching event ever recorded.

Bleaching is what happens when the water gets too warm. The coral expels the algae living in its tissue, turns white, and waits. If temperatures drop in time, it recovers. If they don’t, it dies. The reef doesn’t disappear — it just becomes a skeleton of what it was. Still beautiful, in the way ruins are beautiful.

Most people who’ve visited a reef were wearing sunscreen. Oxybenzone — found in most chemical sunscreens — accelerates bleaching even at trace concentrations. Hawaii, Palau, and the US Virgin Islands have since banned it. Most of us had no idea we were part of the problem.

Bleached Coral Reef

$42 · 11 oz · Vegan coconut-soy · Limited · 100 units

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The Maldives is 1,200 islands scattered across the Indian Ocean, none of them more than a few feet above sea level. It is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It is also one of the first that will go underwater.

Sea level rise isn’t dramatic. It’s incremental — a few millimetres a year, barely worth mentioning until you live somewhere the highest point is a metre above the ocean. Then incremental is everything. Storm surges that used to miss now hit. Freshwater turns saline. Their government has even held cabinet meetings underwater to make the point, and started buying land in other countries for when the time comes to grieve.

The plan isn’t to fight the ocean. The plan is to leave.

Sultry Maldives Saltwind

$42 · 11 oz · Vegan coconut-soy · Limited · 100 units

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The Arctic has always been the place that keeps everything else in check. White ice reflecting sunlight back into space, cold water regulating temperature, the whole system running quietly at the top of the world while everyone else got on with things.

That system is coming apart. The ice that’s left is younger and thinner than it used to be — seasonal ice that melts in summer instead of the thick multiyear sheets that used to survive it. When it goes, dark ocean takes its place. Dark ocean absorbs heat. More heat melts more ice. All gas, no brakes. There’s no natural off switch.

Scientists expect the first ice-free Arctic summer sometime in the 2030s, and like the breeze off that water this candle smells clean, crisp, open. Just missing something it used to have.

Iceless Arctic Breeze

$42 · 11 oz · Vegan coconut-soy · Limited · 100 units

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The summit of the Greenland ice sheet sits 3,216 metres above sea level. On August 14, 2021, it rained there for the first time in recorded history.¹ Scientists were so surprised they initially thought their instruments were broken.

Rain on ice doesn’t freeze and stay. It percolates down through the snowpack, accelerating melt from within. What it signals is harder to sit with: the Arctic is warming so fast that weather systems that used to be impossible at that altitude are now just another Tuesday.

This is the ice sheet Donald Trump wants to buy. It holds enough water to raise global sea levels by 7.4 metres. Eight of the world’s largest coastal cities will be affected. Do the math. The smell of cold rain is new, but the disappearing act isn’t.

Midnight Sunshower

$42 · 11 oz · Vegan coconut-soy · Limited · 100 units

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The sagebrush sea covers more of the American West than any other ecosystem: 175 million acres across eleven states, more land than France. Most people have driven through it on the way to somewhere else without even noticing.

In the 1800s, someone brought cheatgrass from Eurasia, accidentally mixed into crop seed and straw. Cheatgrass germinates fast, dries out early, and burns like tissue paper. Sagebrush burns too — 1.3 million acres a year never return — but takes a human lifetime or two to come back.

Cheatgrass returns the very next season. An invasive that nobody wanted, that smells like nothing, replacing something immediately recognizable: sharp, resinous, ancient.

Withering Western Sagebrush

$42 · 11 oz · Vegan coconut-soy · Limited · 100 units

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Larrea tridentata has been growing in the Mojave for over 11,000 years. The King Clone, a single clonal colony near Lucerne Valley, California, is one of the oldest living organisms on Earth. When it rains, the plant releases the oils that have been building in its leaves through the dry months. Woody, medicinal, ancient. It’s one of the two scents that started this company, and if you’ve ever driven Route 395 when a storm is building, you already know exactly what we mean.

The desert Southwest is getting drier and wetter at the same time. Longer droughts bake the ground until it can’t absorb anything, then climate change delivers rain in bursts the land has no idea what to do with. The result is flash floods, the number one storm-related killer in the United States. More than half of those deaths are people in vehicles who thought they could make it across, some of whom almost certainly had Friends of Coal (looking at you, Kentucky) stickers on their lifted trucks.

That’s the thing about creosote. To anyone who’s spent time in the desert Southwest, it’s one of the most beloved smells on earth. But sometimes it’s also a disaster warning.

Creosote Before the Flood

$42 · 11 oz · Vegan coconut-soy · Limited · 100 units

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