Gilded doesn’t smell like candles*, but it feels like candlelight. It’s just two days past the solstice and the days are heart-breakingly short. All the light feels swaddled in cloud and held tight against the earth. Morning isn’t up for breakfast and evening encroaches on a late lunch. No wonder that we fill our homes with candles and tiny lights, shining foil stars, and fire. Those bright points of golden light.

Gilded glows.

I wondered if this would feel like El Anatsui’s Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta  that was made for an exhibition in Edinburgh last year — a vast shimmering wall of gold that turned the whole room into sunlight — but Gilded is built on a more intimate scale. It doesn’t soar or intimidate. This is a light you can cup your hands around. For all the frankincense and myrrh and beeswax, it doesn’t conjure churches for me.

Or, no. Damn it. It does. But it doesn’t conjure mass and billowing thuribles and gothic arches, not even the encrusted gold threads on vestments**. Gilded holds the light of small candles in front of a devotional diptych panel in a dark side chapel (the varnish catching and sharing the gleam.) And so now all I can think of is the way the netherlandish painters created gold from ground pigments and oil and skill***, building the illusion of polished metal, the texture of gold brocades, the lines of connection between angels and earth. 

(Of course there are parallels here with how perfumers build illusions in the air, sculpting light from scent. )

Pia Long has bottled gold.

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* Yes, it is related to the Boujee Bougies Gilt candle, but Gilded’s a fully-formed perfume rather than the candle decanted into a bottle. The candles, though, are superb.

** do you know how tempted I am to show you my very favourite pieces of opus anglicanum here even if it was for dressing a horse rather than a priest? But then I’d have to go on a diversion about how they are lions, it’s just the nomenclature of heraldry in France that insists that you cna’t have lions passant guardant and so they must be leopards. They are absolutely lions. Beautifully derpy ones.

*** earlier painters used gold leaf, as much as their patrons could afford. Not Van Eyck, van de Weyden, and those who followed. They did this with paint alone.