About

Welcome to Firebird Bath & Body

We make handcrafted soaps, perfumes, lip balms and more- featuring bold colors and textures, uncommon fragrances, and high-quality skin-friendly ingredients.

With scents inspired by things like the inside of a wooden cigar box, the smell of the ocean in winter, or the scent on your clothes after a night around the campfire, we create fragrances that tell a story, spark nostalgia, or transport you to another (real or imaginary) place.

We began selling our handmade bath and body products online and at Baltimore-area craft shows and festivals in 2008 and have been mixing up products and blending scents in our little workshop ever since. 

 

Our Story

My name is Brooke and I'm the owner and founder of Firebird Bath & Body. I started this business back in 2008 when I couldn't find affordable handmade bath and body products that excited me the way expensive specialty / niche brands did. 

I envisioned a brand that was handmade but didn't look homemade, offering thoughtfully-designed and formulated products made with high-quality ingredients, and a curated selection of fragrances that were distinctive and unique and not necessarily formulated with mass appeal in mind. 

Bath and body was my initial focus, but I quickly fell in love with creating scents, and perfumes followed shortly after.  What started as an add-on in response to customer requests quickly evolved into a primary focus: I now design most of my scents as perfumes first.

I design the kinds of scents I like to wear and use, which means they're usually relatively linear (the notes unfold in a straightforward fashion vs. changing dramatically over time) and while imagination and storytelling play a role, I nearly always include some recognizable "literal" elements that ground the scent in reality, memory, and experience. My passion is for unexpected combinations of familiar notes, recreating specific personal scent memories (or attempting to), and exploring the idea of curating a personal fragrance library as a way to try on different personas, or project certain facets of your self to the world.

I've had assistants and seasonal helpers over the years, but Firebird is still predominantly a one-person business. Most of the time its just me making the soaps and balms, blending the perfumes, packing the orders, updating the website, planning and testing the new scents and products, answering the emails, and neglecting the social media accounts (I'm working on that one!)

 

Our Name

The Firebird (жар-пти́ца) is a magical creature in Slavic folklore, who appears in numerous fairytales. Sometimes confused with the more commonly known phoenix, the Firebird is usually depicted as a small fire-colored peacock or falcon, with feathers that glow so brightly a single plume can fill an entire room with light. As a child I fell in love with the intricate gilded illustrations in my mother’s Russian fairytale books, especially the ones that included the mysterious and beautiful Firebird.

The Firebird is beautiful but dangerous, highly coveted but difficult to obtain, legendary, mythical, mysterious; a prize to be won- but one that brings doom to it's captor; an omen of a difficult journey- but also a symbol of hope: a promise that all will be illuminated.