H₂O³

The water here is built out of texture.

It never reaches for the conventional sea. Cucumber arrives as crisp flesh, verjus as plain acidity, algae as the vegetal salinity of weed left on a tideline. Morning dew sits on the moss-covered stone.

Then the green turns sharp. Angelica and galbanum have the sap of a stem snapped in half, something wild and close to bitter running under all that transparency. Frankincense cuts through with a cool resinous dryness and moves it off the water and onto the ground. Vetiver roots it there. Driftwood is weathered and already ashore. What began clear ends up damp and mineral, in the particular clarity of the first hours of the day. A shoreline does the same once the mist lifts.

32.JULI was founded in Hamburg by sisters Juli Pätzold and Maria Magdalena Stachowiak, who hold two degrees in olfactory design between them and more than a decade of work behind them. The name belongs to the 32nd of July, a day that exists on no calendar. An architect and a designer by training, the two of them shape the object as closely as they shape the liquid.

Everything is made from plant-based materials alone. Essential oils, botanical extracts, resins, hydrolates and natural isolates are the whole vocabulary, and those materials are pushed a long way from their origins: latex, sun lotion, wet stone, crème brûlée. Each bottle is finished with a ceramic cap the house designed and makes individually by hand, so the marks left by its making stay visible on the object.