Betty has been one of The Glass Studio’s most difficult colourways to get right. The complicated chemistry of molten glass means that not all colours play well together and Betty has been a long process of subtraction, addition, trial and error. She’s also one of the first tumblers the studio was truly happy with and now, a few years down the line, she’s a favourite both here and out there.
Betty is really the first example of what the studio was trying to achieve – a glass that combines and contrasts colours that are oppositional but harmonious, an ever-changing combination that reacts to light in constantly surprising ways.
Each piece of the studio’s coloured glassware is different but everything we do is made with the aim of creating functional art for the table and the home that punctuates the everyday. They are designed to make you look and then look again, always offering something new to notice about the way the marbled glass colours merge and diverge to create unexpected tonal contrasts. That noticing – the act of stopping and seeing and then seeing again – is all about engaging the senses with the art of the everyday, if only for a moment and it’s what we like to think characterises us as a glass design studio.
The way colour underpins the senses is always at the forefront of our minds during the research and development of a new colourway and creating a scented candle has felt like a logical next step. There are a lot of luxury scented candles out there, so the question we have been asking ourselves is what will make ours special? Fragranced candles are of course about engaging the senses, but simply using our hand-blown glass as a vessel seemed disingenuous somehow. It lacked the interaction inherent to the glassblowing process and the interaction we hope people have at home with a Glass Studio piece, regardless of whether that piece is a bud vase, a tall vase, a tumbler or a high ball - the intent is the same.
We came across candle company Bleu Nour by chance and interested in the founder's take on the interaction between colour and scent, we dropped her a line with a view to discussing how she may be able to develop a scent that we felt reflected our glassware and glass blowing processes in a genuine way. We had high hopes, but at the time we really didn’t know the result of this chance meeting would be quite so special.
An expert in scent science, the brand's founder has a rare gift. She has synesthesia, a neurological condition in which information meant for a specific sense stimulates several. In her case this means the sight of colour creates an olfactory experience. She can smell colour and from this our collaboration was born.
She spent months developing a scented response to the studio’s Betty glassware, resulting in a beautiful fragrance found in no other candle anywhere else in the world. With a top note of bergamot and green mandarin, a middle note of black pepper, rose, mock orange and violet de parma and a base of patchouli all contained in natural wax, our first scented candle is the result of a truly special collaboration designed to celebrate colour, engage the senses create a more authentic connection between us and the things we own.