The beauty boss shares how she’ll be celebrating with scents from her new collection.
Christmas. It feels far too early to be talking about it, but for Glasshouse Fragrances founder and CEO Nicole Eckels, it’s been top of mind for months.
In fact, Christmas is about to be a distant
Despite working so far ahead, the brand’s new 25-piece collection, named An Extraordinary Holiday, looks back.
Nicole, a Sydney-based New Yorker, says Christmas was always a big deal in her household growing up.
Spearheaded mostly by her mother, who would collect Christmas villages. What started with a couple of houses soon snowballed to a skating rink and, later, a scene of kids sledding down a hill, trinkets filling trestle table after trestle table. “It got bigger and bigger and bigger — because in the U.S. Christmas is massive,” Nicole says. “But she wouldn’t just put it out, she’d gather us around and tell us stories about it. Like Mr Rogers lives here and this his wife Sally, and she works at the post office. My gosh, we would just sit there mesmerised watching this take place.”
Nicole remembers the windows of these little villages were always lit up, but never with anyone inside. Until now, of course, with the unveiling of the collection which features little characters that peep out of windows, serve Christmas ham or dance with the Nutcracker. Every window is transparent, so as the candle burns the windows illuminate, making the scene come to life.
“The idea is that it’s a village with living, breathing characters and their lifestyles and the things they love are all part of it. They’re all celebrating — many of them have drinks in their hand or they’re playing music or using Glasshouse product,” Nicole says, adding the illustrations were a true collaboration between herself and illustrator Michelle Pereira.
“We approached her and asked her to draw some characters. We told her we wanted some kind of dinner going on, and a rooftop party, and said she could make up the rest. And that’s what she did,” Nicole says. “It was just so fun to work on, there’s these little Easter eggs everywhere, on every package.”
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Advertise with NZME.The attention to detail in this collection is unparalleled, even down to the architectural styles of the five houses that feature throughout. “We started orienting the characters on different houses. When you look at it, some houses are modern — they have that classic London roof. Then some of them are Federation-style, and some are Victorian. We started to play with the architecture as well. The whole thing was fun,” Nicole says.
The storytelling element passed down from her mother is something Nicole hopes people will feel inspired to do with the collection, but rather than assign her illustrations with gender norms, each character is genderless — a conscious decision she made early on.
“I didn’t want people to become obsessed about the person or the character and make a judgement about them or their lives. I wanted them to be so enthralled in the joy and celebration that gender didn’t even matter,” she says. “There’s a little pencil, a green Martian, it’s all so random. I didn’t want people to be distracted from the bigger picture here, which is that there’s a lot of wonderful things going on.”
While the scents in An Extraordinary Holiday aren’t new, they are iconic. Rather than reinvent the wheel every festive season, Glasshouse Fragrances releases five of its signature scents from its vault every Christmas — Night Before Christmas (dancing sugar plums), White Christmas (cedar leaf and fruity clove), Gingerbread House (festive spiced biscuit), Christmas Morning (spiced blood orange and pine) and Under The Mistletoe (spiced apple and red berries).
The only exception being Festival Of Lights, Glasshouse Fragrances’ new limited-edition Hanukkah candle, which is scented with sugar and spiced doughnuts.
“Christmas is aesthetic, you want your rituals that you repeat every year with your family. You’re making memories. You want that trigger to go back to that. I don’t like to change Christmas scents unless something’s not working,” she says, speaking to the mood-altering, memory-evoking powers of scent. “How are you meant to effectively build a ritual or an event around Christmas without repeating something?”
In the U.S., Nicole says pine is a traditional Christmas scent, adding the team has launched one specifically in that market this year (it will be added to the Australasian line-up for Christmas in 2024).
For now, she’s excited to share Festival Of Lights with a new community of consumers. The idea for a Hanukkah candle came to Nicole during a trade show in the U.S. Chatting to an independent retailer, Nicole was told the store “doesn’t do Christmas” so thought to question the reason why. Turns out, the business was Jewish — which made sense given the burgeoning Jewish community residing in New York and its surrounding suburbs.
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Advertise with NZME.Then the light-bulb moment came. “Being from New York, I have so many Jewish friends. I thought — well, why isn’t anybody doing anything for Hanukkah?” she says.
It was opportune, really, that Nicole already had a scent stored in the vault which would lend itself beautifully to a Hanukkah candle. Formerly known as Spiced Moonlight, Nicole says she’d been waiting for a moment to bring it out and share it with the world.
“I love it. It’s pitched as a gourmand because it’s that sugar-spiced doughnut, but its more spicy, which is quite holiday. It goes well with the Hanukkah celebration because there’s lots of fried foods like these little doughnuts that have jam inside,” she says.
This year, Nicole is looking forward to spending the festive season at her brother’s house in New York, celebrating with an all-out Christmas extravaganza that reminds her so much of her childhood.
Christmas sweaters and an annual screening of Elf are a must on Christmas Eve, along with an easy meal or takeaway to take the pressure off the host ahead of the big day. “There’s no end to Christmas sweaters and how crazy they can get. Everyone has to buy their own sweater — it’s mandatory to arrive in it along with some kind of Christmas hat,” she says. “The crazier the sweatshirt, the better. They light up, they play music, it’s totally overrated.”
Then there’s the Christmas Eve cocktail-making competition, decorated with crushed candy canes and the like. “Someone finds a recipe and we make these Christmas cocktails together and sit around have nibbles. It’s so nice,” Nicole says.
The next day is a traditional Christmas feast, a sensorial experience complete with all manner of Glasshouse Fragrances’ scents to keep the festive feeling going.
“I’m a big believer in having an extraordinary table — I want to create a scene. Beautiful Glasshouse vessels all over the table, Christmas crackers on crazy, fancy plates, so many amazing things and all with a camp, 1960s vibe. I really go for it,” she says, adding each scent is designed to not conflict with festive food like a bright floral or oceanic scent would.
The first drop of the Glasshouse Fragrances An Extraordinary Holiday collection is priced from $26 and is available from today, with a second drop pegged for October 23. Expect to see 60g and 380g soy candles, fragrance diffusers, scent stems and interior fragrance sprays in all six Christmas scents, alongside brand-new limited-edition gifts including baubles, keyring gift sets, boxed gift sets and the now-iconic annual release of its Advent Calendar. Available from selected independent retailers or online at Nz.glasshousefragrances.com.
