Smells Like Justice!
Flame and Flower’s Emma Calcutt AKA Cammy Leon speaks to SAR about her foray into the world of scents in creating her latest candle, Smells Like Justice, from which she is donating %100 of the profits to the antiracist organisation.
Emma is cooking away in her kitchen, rustling up another healthy and frankly delicious looking meal, for which she is well known, when we commence the interview. We start, as all stories should, at the beginning, and I ask her where her interest in making candles came from.
“I started making candles as gifts for Christmas presents, a couple of Christmases ago,” she admits, it was not initially meant to be a commercial enterprise, but her enjoyment from it, and people’s continued interest in her products really allowed her to grow the business organically, allowing it to develop slowly and giving her the ability to control the elements of it that she feels strongly about. Last year’s furlough contributed to more time to research products and materials.
Emma is aware that not everyone will want to spend £20 plus on a candle, but she is fixedly uncompromising about her ethics, and her standards, and well aware of her choices, “I never take the easy path,” she laughs. She is genuinely sanguine about the slow growth of her business, “It’s my baby, my creation I’m growing it from seed, I don’t believe the point in taking short cuts?”
Emma’s focus when she started was on making beautiful scents for her friends and family to enjoy. She confessed to a lifelong love of essential oils, sparked in her teenage years, and she told me with a wistful sigh about discovering all the natural oils her brother’s girlfriend used to keep. It started a love affair with natural perfume and aromatherapy. “I have a sensitivity to synthetic perfumes, I react to them quite badly,” Emma states, “my throat swells and I get a headache, and it’s apparently not an uncommon reaction.” Even high-end perfumes with nature-identical scents contain chemicals that can irritate and cause a reaction, so she sticks exclusively with natural oils, proclaiming, “There’s nothing like them.”
It is clear the Emma cares about producing a high-quality product, her wax is sustainably sourced and she chooses to use soy wax as it has a lower melt-point than paraffin and so burns for longer, and releases more of the perfume into the air rather than have it all consumed by the flame. Soy wax is also a much cleaner burn, so it is significantly less sooty, and it is water-soluble meaning any drips or spills can be cleaned up with a bit of soap and water. It also burns longer, and it releases more fragrance. And really, Emma is all about the fragrance.
She sources the individual essential oils from UK suppliers with a view to being as local as possible, “It’s really easy to get premixed fragrances from online suppliers, but they are either synthetic or generic, and they can even contain endangered species of plants, and I don’t want that.” She hopes one day to have her product sourced completely from local wilding projects, although this is only a dream at the moment Emma has her eye on Dane Vince’s proposals for re-wilding and her finger crossed that something will come of it. “Dale Vince’s rewilding idea, I’d really like that. It would be the ideal for the country, and for the world.”
She chose to create this particular candle as a way of getting involved locally in what she believes to be a very important project. Stroud Against Racism is an organisation she has shown support for previously, and she has volunteered with them running the stand in town. “You have to do what you can do,” she says, “It was the spark of the 2020 BLM protests that made me want to get involved with the longstanding struggle. I want SAR to really concentrate on education, it’s everyone’s history. We need to make our kids aware of these things.”
The Smells Like Justice candles will be available on the Stroud Against Racism shop online, and through Flame and Flower, for £25 each.
Article by Eleanor Polly Healey, founder or Stroud Against Racism.