I have always wanted to time travel.
When I learned about ancient sites like Pompeii and Stonehenge as a child, my curiosity was overwhelming. I wanted to be in those places in their prime. I wanted to walk busy streets and talk to people in every tongue (an ability that somehow came packaged with time travel). I wanted to explore landscapes that came not only before us, but before insects and dinosaurs and whales and birds too.
My curiosity was so powerful, it seemed like it should simply fling me into the past. Much to my disappointment, it didn’t. So I did the next best thing: I made time travel my career.
That is, I became an international science journalist with a focus on the past. I have spent more than 20 years tagging along with archaeologists, paleontologists, geneticists, anthropologists, geologists, historians, archivists, linguists, and other researchers around the world who are as obsessed with the history of life on Earth as I am. If you're of like mind, you may have seen some of my stories in the New York Times, National Geographic, or Scientific American, among many other publications. You can read some of those stories at my journalism website, jenpinkowski.com. For select candles, I've linked to my reporting on the site and era.
Deep Time* Candle Co. is really a continuation of that work, but here I use scent and light rather than words and ink to tell authentic stories about the past. Every candle is grounded in research but creatively interpreted—a reflection of the past, not an exact replica.
By crafting exclusive fragrance blends as unique, complex, and compelling as the places and eras that inspired them, I hope to connect you to our collective past on Earth: the sweet golden grasses of the Neolithic Great Plains, the pretty perfumes of the first flowers on Earth more than 100 million years ago, the rich blend of sea, rose, and simit floating over the seven hills of medieval Constantinople—and so many other moments in history that you’ll find in our ever-growing catalog.
In essence, I hope they give you a bit of time travel, whether that's to the candle location or to a moment in your own personal past. Or perhaps you’ll stay in the here and now, creating new scent-memories for future you to recall.
And I'm biased, but they smell fantastic.
—Jen Pinkowski, founder & maker
* Our name and logo are inspired by the concept of "deep time,” which is often used in fields such as geology and astronomy that must grapple with enormous time spans. The spiral is a common visual representation of this concept. I’m also inspired by the spiral motifs found in cultures across the world for millennia—especially metalwork from the Bronze and Iron Ages.