Summer Forever
Some ideas come to me as smells. Others arrive as moods, textures, half-memories. Summer Forever started as an Addison Rae song that somehow got tattooed onto my Spotify algorithm. (Am I allowed to say that? Addison, if you’re reading this — let’s collab, girl.) It’s about the kind of thought you have when the sun hits your floorboards the right way and things like beauty and young love feel possible.
When I began building it in scent, I wasn’t thinking about nostalgia so much as temperature — that weightless warmth that inspires so many of my artist-made candles. I wanted it to smell like 8 p.m. in late July: the moment when the light softens but the heat still holds. A mix of salt and skin, citrus peel and sunburn, the faint smoke of something still burning out.
I start every candle the same way I start a drawing — with gesture. For this one, I sketched loops and rays that looked like heat rising off asphalt. Then I started testing notes that felt round, golden, and slightly blurred at the edges. Amber for the warmth, bergamot for the open window, cedar for the shadow that follows — the sensory palette behind this hand-poured candle. I kept the composition simple, like a deep breath you don’t want to end.
As I mixed, the studio filled with the smell of sunlight — or maybe just my version of it. That’s the thing about scent: it’s half memory, half imagination. You can never really recreate a season; you can only build an echo of how it felt. Summer Forever became my way of holding onto that echo — of refusing to let it fade when the days get shorter.
People often talk about candles as cozy things, meant for colder months. But I think of them as timekeepers — small handcrafted designs made in my Vancouver candle studio to carry light forward. When I pour them by hand, I’m not making something to decorate a room — I’m bottling a moment. Each burn is a reminder that warmth doesn’t disappear; it just changes form.
Maybe that’s all I ever want my work to do — to stretch a single, fleeting feeling into something that lasts a little longer. Summer Forever isn’t about endless sunshine. It’s about the briefness that makes it precious, and the art of staying in that warmth, even when it’s gone.
Matty
