Love. Lust. Light. is a “luxury body & boudouir” candle by Naked Princess.
“The act of sketching by hand and modeling the candle form in clay helped me generate and explore possible design directions. I love the freedom of ideation that the motion of my hands, or the pen flowing against the paper, gives me. It’s a tactile and sensual creative process… I want women to love to touch and hold the objects I create… feeling the form in my hands enables me to make adjustments that would otherwise not occur to me if I were to only sketch in the computer with a mouse.” – Creative Director, Becca B. Frank
More photos after the jump!
“There are so many steps to the design process. It took months of research and exploration just to figure out what the candle vessel would be made of. We looked at hand blown glass, etched glass, precious metal… I had a handful of different shapes I explored in clay and two that I modeled on the computer and in resin. By the time I started to fall in love with ceramic, I knew that I wanted a form that was rounded at the bottom and tapered at the top like a teardrop. I felt this was a sensual yet functional shape. At that point my concern was really whether the liquid wax would pour well from the vessel, so I decided to explore the possibility of a spout on both sides. I hadn’t seen this done before. I kept imagining how a woman or a man might use the candle, how they might want to reach for it quickly to pour onto their partner’s body in a passionate/loving moment… In that kind of moment, I didn’t want them to have to think about where the pour spout was.” – – Creative Director, Becca B. Frank
“From beginning to end, the candle process took almost two years. There are moments I love to think back on…I remember watching our creative director, Becca Frank, trying all kinds of different shapes late into the night. At one point it was like she was Demi Moore in a scene out of Ghost, passionately spinning away at the pottery wheel, except, of course, she didn’t have her Patrick Swayze. Once she found the shape that she and Jordana loved, I had samples made, but the ceramic samples that came back were not white or thin enough. We ended up using porcelain because it allowed the vessel to have thinner walls, which kept the shape delicate. Production, especially sourcing who could make the candle in the United States, was the biggest challenge. Our company has a big commitment to manufacturing in the USA. All our formulas and our couture lingerie are made here. But as a new, smaller brand, we couldn’t find anyone who would agree to make less than 20,000 vessels with our custom design. In the end, we took the project to Liling in the Hunan province of China where a small crew of artisans made our vessels by hand with extreme attention to detail. Unlike other companies they did not balk when we wanted to add a silk tassel that a woman could take off the candle and wear if she wanted. That required making an eyelet on the top of the lid. No easy task when you are talking about porcelain and such a delicate design. But they did it. And, they did it beautifully.” —Tom Dickerson, Product Production Coordinator
