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\n\n\n

Did you know Cleopatra had four children by two of the most famous men in history?

Most people remember her as the great seductress of Rome, but they rarely talk about her as a mother. Yet motherhood was central to Cleopatra’s political vision. Her children were not simply heirs tucked away in a palace nursery; they were part of a carefully staged future she was trying to build.

At age 21 she gave birth to Julius Caesar’s child. The boy was named Ptolemy XV Caesar, but he became widely known as Caesarion — “little Caesar.” Cleopatra was remarkably strategic about ensuring he was understood to be Caesar’s son. Across Egypt she commissioned temple reliefs depicting herself and Caesarion as a divine mother and child, reinforcing the idea that he was the offspring of a god-like ruler. She also travelled to Rome with the infant and lived in Caesar’s villa across the Tiber between 46 and 44 BC, a bold and highly visible presence in the Roman capital. Her appearances with the child were a clear signal to Rome’s elite about his parentage.

\n\n

\n\n $\"Cleopatra$ \n\n

\n\n

When Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March in 44 BC, Cleopatra was actually in Rome. As soon as she heard the news, she gathered her young son and left the city, returning quickly to Alexandria. With Caesar dead, the protection he offered vanished overnight, and Cleopatra knew the child claiming to be his son could be in grave danger. Some speculate that Cleopatra may even have been pregnant with Caesar’s second child at the time of his assassination and experienced a miscarriage during the turmoil that followed, though there is no definitive evidence for this.

After Caesar’s death, Mark Antony summoned Cleopatra to meet him in Tarsus in 41 BC to secure her loyalty. Cleopatra arrived in extraordinary style, sailing up the river on a gilded barge dressed as the goddess Isis. The meeting quickly turned into one of history’s most famous political romances. Antony followed her back to Alexandria, where they spent the winter together in a whirlwind of feasts and spectacle.

\n\n\n

\n\n $\"Cleopatra$ \n\n

\n\n

After this winter in Alexandria, Cleopatra gave birth to twins by Antony at the age of 29: Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. Their names — the sun and the moon — reflected Cleopatra’s flair for symbolism. A few years later she gave birth to her final child, Ptolemy Philadelphus. By this point Cleopatra was raising not one heir but an entire small dynasty.

One of the most extraordinary moments in her life as a mother came in 34 BC during the Donations of Alexandria. As a mother aiming to protect her children’s future, she convinced Antony to give her what might be the greatest Mother’s Day gift in history. In a spectacular public ceremony in Alexandria, Cleopatra was proclaimed Queen of Kings while Caesarion was declared King of Kings and formally recognised as the son of Julius Caesar. The younger children were then presented to the crowd dressed in miniature royal regalia and assigned territories across the eastern Mediterranean. It was political theatre on a grand scale — Cleopatra mapping out a future empire through her children.

\n\n

\n\n $\"Cleopatra$ \n\n

\n\n

But the performance enraged Rome, particularly Octavian. As he closed in on Cleopatra and Mark Antony, she did everything she could to protect her children, even sending letters to Octavian in an attempt to bargain for their safety. She knew the greatest danger was to Caesarion. As the son of Julius Caesar, he represented a rival claim to power. When defeat became inevitable, Cleopatra sent the teenage Caesarion south from Alexandria with plans for him to escape toward India, far beyond Roman reach. According to ancient accounts, however, he was betrayed by his tutor, who convinced him to return, promising that Octavian would spare him. It was a fatal mistake. Caesarion was captured and executed.

\n\n

\n\n $\"Alexander$ \n\n

\n\n

After Cleopatra’s death in 30 BC, the other three children — Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene and Ptolemy Philadelphus — were taken to Rome and raised in the household of Octavia, Mark Antony’s former wife and the sister of Octavian. In one of history’s quieter ironies, the children of Cleopatra were brought up by the woman their father had left for her. Octavia was known for her dignity and generosity, and ancient sources suggest she raised the children alongside her own, giving them a stable Roman upbringing.

Cleopatra had done everything she could to protect them. In the end, only one of her children would carry her story forward. Cleopatra Selene later married King Juba II of Mauretania and became a respected queen in her own right, ruling a sophisticated North African court that blended Egyptian, Greek and Roman culture. Rome may have defeated Cleopatra, but through her daughter, a trace of her dynasty — and her ambition — survived.

\n\n

\n\n","handle","cleopatra-the-mother","gid://shopify/Article/618239820041",{"_15":182,"_183":-5,"_22":184,"_102":185,"_100":186},"gid://shopify/ArticleImage/236857229577","altText","https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0939/6702/4393/articles/cleopatra-the-mother_351dfbd3-b649-43be-b79b-bfb5d51e3e14.jpg?v=1779911878",1080,1350,"publishedAt","2026-05-27T19:46:57Z","Cleopatra the Mother",{"_178":191},"letters",{"_173":193,"_176":194,"_178":195,"_15":196,"_86":197,"_187":202,"_38":203,"_163":204},{"_17":175}," $\"Be$ \n

Be Like Water

\n\n

\n\n\n

Here we are, bang in the middle of Pisces season. The final sign, the mutable water sign, the blur at the edge of the calendar. Even if you don't care about astrology, you can feel things loosening and edges softening. There’s a sense that what might’ve felt solid in January is now becoming permeable.

Of course, 39BC has always been channelling water. Before it was metaphor, it was medium — before it was mood, it was the bath. We built this world on the belief that immersion changes you and that soaking is recalibration. We bathe daily (sometimes twice-daily) in honour of this belief.

The ancients understood it well.

For the Romans, water was civilisation itself. Aqueducts were feats of engineering and political theatre: Proof of order, proof of power. The baths were civic infrastructure, as essential as roads. You moved through heat in sequence — hot, warm, cold — opening, softening, sealing. Business was conducted, philosophies debated, skin oiled. Water was controlled, channelled, choreographed…and always deeply sensual.

\n\n

\n\n\n $\"nun\"$ \n\n

Nun

The Egyptians went further back. Before the world existed, there was Nun — the primordial, infinite waters of chaos from which all creation emerged. The Nile's annual flood meant renewal, fertility, survival. Water was origin and rebirth, marking the transitions between states of being. Immersion was transformation, plain and simple.

Two civilisations, two truths: water as infrastructure, water as origin. And yet here we are, centuries later, still making a case for the bath.

The mood outside is sharp-edged and declarative, everyone performing a very firm opinion about something. Water offers a survival strategy. It surrounds, reshapes the container, erodes what is rigid over time without ever announcing itself. Pisces season invites that same softness, a willingness to dissolve just enough to be reorganised.

\n $\"Bruce$ \n

Nun

Bruce Lee gets the credit for the expression “be like water”, but Laozi wrote it first. The Tao Te Ching is full of water. The idea was never about passivity or surrender in the weak sense. It was about being so adaptive, so fluid, that nothing could get a grip on you. You cannot punch water, after all.

This week we're thinking about immersion — cultural, emotional, sensory — about surrender as strategy, and the bath as both civic ritual and cosmic return.

Run it deep. Stay under.

\n\n $\"Sage$ \n

Sage Water – the clue is in the name

Sage Water was always going to be this week's favourite product (the clue is in the name). Its scent notes — rain, moss, salt — transport you to the edge of open water, that precise moment before you go under, when the cold air hits your skin and your whole nervous system reorients. One reviewer described it as a \"haunting scent that clouds the apartment in deeply rich waves\" that \"continues to flutter off the skin for hours after bathing.\" Another was simply: floored.

It was inspired by the priests of Isis, who purified themselves in sacred water before ritual — as a threshold, a crossing from one state into another. Which is, of course, exactly what we're talking about this week.

\n\n $\"Places$ \n\n

If the bath is where you start, the lake is where you go deeper. Visit our edit of the world's most ancient swimming lakes — from the salt-rich waters of Lake Siwa, where the Temple of the Oracle of Amun rises from the dunes and Cleopatra's story lingers in the landscape, to the glacial stillness of Bassenthwaite, where Roman soldiers once navigated the northern frontier. These aren't destinations for the Instagram grid. They are places where the past is still present, where the water has been carrying people's weight — literally and otherwise — for millennia. Very much the spirit of this week.

\n $\"The$ \n

Toni Morrison – The Site of Memory

\n\n\n

\n\n

A Book we Love

Trust the late, great Toni Morrison to give us one of the most beautiful descriptions of water we have ever read. In The Site of Memory, she wrote: \"All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.\" We return to this every year — it captures something about immersion that no wellness brief ever could, the idea that water doesn't move forward so much as it remembers. For those who want to go deeper into Morrison's world, critic and novelist Namwali Serpell has just published On Morrison, a masterful re-examination of why Morrison remains so wilfully, brilliantly misunderstood. Read the AnOther interview here.

\n\n

\n\n\n\n $\"Sant$ \n\n

Sant Roch

\n\n

News from the Bathing World

Another week, another exquisite bathhouse opening. On Monday, Sant Roch opened its doors in Paris, a stone's throw from the Tuileries, and it is exactly the kind of place we have been willing into existence. Inspired by the Roman baths of Lutetia and ancient ritual, it is France's first contrast therapy venue. The design sets the tone immediately — a ground floor hallway of stone fountains and terracotta tiles, original 1930s flooring patterned with tiny yellow and white tiles, wooden lockers, dimly lit throughout. The largest sauna in France spans over 60 square metres, transformed into a full sensory environment: immersive playlists, shifting lighting, aromatherapy thrown onto the fire. Then five cold plunge basins kept between 3°C and 8°C for an immediate physical and mental reset. Sounds — and looks — like heaven.

\n\n

\n\n $\"editorial$ \n

Shooting in Paris

A Note from Shar

I have spent the last couple of weeks oscillating between full desk mode and the kind of week that reminds you why you started. The desk week was genuinely my favourite kind — back to back meetings about the 39BC Bathing Club (more news on that coming soon), the Selfridges pop-up coming in April, investor conversations that went well (meaningfully well), and a finance session that involved going through every single receipt. In between I watched documentaries on ancient Japan, read about Japanese mythology, and spent time with my sister.

Then it was off to London. I took the train down for Paloma Elsesser's Back Talk salon at Dover Street Market — a gathering where she invites friends to share personal writing. It was exactly as beautiful as it sounds. I met Adrian Joffe, CEO of the DSM Group, who oversees every brand including mine, and we had a long conversation about Cleopatra before I read my piece, Grease My Scalp.

\n\n\n\n

From there, it was onto Paris. I did a super quick bath shoot in my Airbnb and then headed out for a very special install. We've been stocked at Dover Street Parfums Market since December, but for Fashion Week we were invited to create a pillar installation. Our initial designs were too red — I hadn't appreciated how specific their colour parameters were — so we scaled back to a paler design featuring our Cleopatra and Caesarion print, originally created for the tissue paper. I hold my opinions strongly and lightly in equal measure, and in this case they chose well.

It was a simple install, and yet I got a little emotional. Something about seeing 39BC activated in that space, in that city, during Fashion Week, made everything feel real in a new way.

Have a beautiful week.

Shar x

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\n $\"Mars,$ \n

Mars, god of war and agriculture

Today is the first of March. And if you're feeling something shift — a loosening, a subtle sense of arrival — you're not imagining it. You're just on Roman time.

March 1st was the original Roman new year. The calendar, attributed to Romulus, started with Martius — named after Mars, god of war and agriculture — and ran for ten months. Which is why September till December are named after the seventh till tenth months. They were, once, exactly that. Winter wasn't counted at all; it was simply a gap. A nameless stretch of dormancy between one year and the next. Even the Romans knew better than to pretend anything meaningful happens in February.

\n $\"Deciption$ \n

A deciption of Terminalia

Just before the new year, they marked the transition with the Terminalia. A festival for Terminus, god of boundaries and border stones. Neighbours gathered at the stones dividing their land, poured offerings of grain, honey and wine, and formally acknowledged the line between one world and the next. They didn’t cross it – just honoured that it was there. The threshold itself was the point.

We've rather lost the art of that. But the Romans were onto something: the space between is not empty. It's where everything actually happens. They even had a word for it — limen, the threshold, the doorstep, the moment before you cross over. It's where we get ‘liminal’ from, and liminality is not a waiting room. It's a state of transformation in its own right. You are not yet what you are about to become. Which is, if you think about it, a rather beautiful place to be.

That brings us, as it always does, to the bath – the ultimate liminal space. Think about it: you step into the bath carrying the day. You step out without it. The water does something that nothing else quite manages: it marks the moment.

Before and after. Then and now.

The Romans made offerings at the threshold. We draw a bath.

\n\n $\"sage$ \n\n

Sage Water

Sage Water was made for exactly this moment. It smells like cold air over wet earth — salty, herbal, the particular freshness of a morning that hasn't decided whether it's still winter. In the water, it transforms into a milky, oil-rich lather that leaves skin nourished rather than stripped. A threshold scent, for a threshold day.

\n $\"beauty$ \n

On the subject of thresholds — the ancient Egyptians had a different kind. We've been revisiting our piece in the Journal on the Egyptian caryatid mirror: a bronze object from the New Kingdom, dating to around 950 BC, whose reflective disk was a portal. Much more than just a surface, it was a threshold between the mortal and the divine, between the living and the eternal. Long before mirrors became objects of vanity, they held the promise of renewal.

What strikes us, returning to it on the original Roman new year, is how insistently the ancient world came back to this idea — that transformation requires a crossing point. The Romans had their boundary stones. The Egyptians had their mirrors. We have Silk Veil, whose box bears this exact mirror, because when you're building a luxury bathing brand rooted in antiquity, you don't reach for generic florals. You reach for a 3,000-year-old symbol of divine renewal and put it on the packaging.

\n $\"A$ \n

A piece from Rodin's Collection

On our Cultural Radar

If you’re in New York, move quickly. Rodin’s Egypt at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World closes March 15. It’s the first U.S. exhibition dedicated to his private Egyptian collection — more than sixty objects that quietly, radically reshaped how he understood the human form: As devotion, as vessel, as threshold. Ancient Egypt taught Rodin that the body could hold eternity, and that beauty was a technology of transcendence. We quite agree.

And in London, Ramses and the Pharaohs’ Gold has just opened at Battersea Power Station. One hundred and eighty artefacts, many never before leaving Egypt, including the original wooden coffin of Ramses II. Bear witness to a civilisation organised around passage — the body prepared with precision, the soul imagined in motion, ritual as architecture for crossing between worlds. It opened on February 28. The original Roman New Year is today. We love the alignment of it all.

\n $\"helena$ \n

Helena Christensen

\n\n

A Book we Love

Véronique Vial's Women Before 10am has been on our minds this week. The French photographer spent years getting herself invited into the bedrooms and bathrooms of some of the most watched women in the world — Angelica Jolie, Julianne Moore, Salma Hayek, — and photographing them before the armour went on. No makeup, no performance, hair undone. The threshold between private and public self, caught on film before the crossing begins. We love it because it insists that this is the interesting hour. Not the red carpet. Not the interview. The moment before, in the bathroom, when nobody is quite anybody yet. We wrote about it in the journal.

A Book we Love

\n $\"Documentary$ \n

A Note from Shar

After weeks of non-stop travel — including the Japan research trip I told you about last week, which I am still honestly processing — I am so glad to be home in Wolverhampton. Long walks. Longer baths. And a lot of work on 39BC, including the launch of our new Bathing Club: our membership service that gets you 10% off every recurring order and a stream of forthcoming surprises we're very excited about. Select your favourite 39BC product to subscribe now and make sure you're never without.

My head is still full of Japan — the onsens, the rituals, the particular quality of attention the Japanese bring to water — and I came home looking at everything differently. Which is perhaps why what happened last Sunday felt like the universe making a point. I was in the bath watching a documentary about Japanese gardens and found myself wondering if there were any in England. One Google later, I discovered there's one in Wolverhampton… In the cemetery where my beloved late grandparents are buried. I actually had to put my phone down. I was dressed and in the car within minutes.

\n\n

\n\n $\"The$ \n\n

\n\n

The Japanese Garden in Wolverhampton

\n\n

After paying respects to my grandparents, as I've done for twenty years, I turned around and there it was — the Danescourt Cemetery Japanese Garden, literally a stone's throw from their graves, unmarked on any map. Designed by Peter Bridge, a former Birmingham nightclub owner who studied Zen meditation and read every book ever written on Japanese gardens, despite never once visiting Japan. He died last year at 83. The synchronicity of finding it now, after everything I've just seen, in a place I've been visiting my whole life — I still can't quite get over it. It feels like a sign from my ancestors – and from the universe – that I’m truly on the right path.

Shar x

\n\n

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\n\n

It's that strange late-winter stretch where you realise you've been living almost entirely from the neck up. Emailing. Zooming. Thinking. Scrolling horizontally. Our thumbs have had an exceptional season. The rest of us? Slightly under-stimulated.

So this week, we're thinking about how to get back into our bodies. Not in a punishing way. In a pleasurable way. The kind that involves turning the music up while you cook. Walking the long way home just to feel the air on your face. Stretching on the living room floor for no reason whatsoever. Wearing something that makes you newly aware of your own shoulders.

We've become extraordinarily efficient at abstraction. We live in documents, in feeds, in ideas. Meanwhile the body — loyal, patient — is waiting for texture. Heat. Movement. Contact. Something unscheduled.

\n\n

\n\n $\"The$ \n

The ancient gymnasium

\n\n

The ancient Greeks, in particular, would have found our current condition mildly baffling. For them, the body wasn't a project to optimise or an inconvenience to drag through the day. It was something to cultivate. Arete — excellence — applied as much to the physical form as to the intellect. To care for the body was not vanity; it was virtue.

Gymnasia weren't simply places to sweat. They were social and philosophical arenas. Training, debate, oiling the skin, competition — physical and intellectual life unfolding side by side. The word itself comes from gymnos, meaning naked. There was no embarrassment about form. The body was visible, admired, refined. Sculpture wasn't fantasy; it was devotion rendered in marble.

And then there were the baths. Not rushed showers squeezed between meetings, but ritual sequences: warm rooms, hot rooms, cold plunges. Skin scraped clean with a strigil. Olive oil infused with herbs pressed back in. Care was tactile. Deliberate. Communal.

Even the gods had bodies. Aphrodite rising from the sea. Apollo radiant and sun-warmed. Eros not a pastel greeting card but a destabilising, physical force — felt in the chest, in the stomach, in the pulse. To them, the body wasn't separate from meaning. It was the site of it.

Which makes our slightly hunched, backlit existence feel less inevitable and more… negotiable.

Move differently this week. Eat slowly. Stand in the shower longer than strictly necessary. Stretch your spine. Book the sauna. Oil your skin like it's an art form. Lie on the floor and breathe like a dramatic heroine in a 1970s film.

February doesn't need another optimisation strategy. It needs sensation.

This week, we're coming back down — and into ourselves.

\n\n

\n\n $\"Denari$ \n\n

\n\n

We mentioned Denarii last week, and we're mentioning it again — because this is precisely the letter it was made for. Frankincense, patchouli, sandalwood: the scent profile of the Roman thermae, where bathing was never rushed and the body was never an afterthought. If last week was about winding down, this week is about coming back in. The oil transforms into a perfumed milk on contact with water — tactile, deliberate, unhurried. The ancient Romans called it cura corporis. Care of the body, as intention rather than vanity.

\n $\"Tekla$ \n

Tekla Sauna Hat

The world is remembering what we've always known: bathing is ritual, not routine. The bathing renaissance continues.

Tekla just launched their Sauna Collection — lightweight pieces inspired by Finnish bathing rituals, designed for use during and after sauna. The sauna hat alone is worth the click. It's proof that the culture is shifting — people are building entire wardrobes around the act of slowing down, getting warm, and coming back to their bodies.

We're also loving Salus Per Aquam (or, S.P.A.), a newsletter dedicated entirely to bathing culture. The most recent piece is a deep dive into Traditional Chinese Medicine and bathing practices — exploring how warmth moves qi, prevents stagnation, and supports the body through winter. TCM practitioners discuss everything from foot baths with ginger and mugwort to the philosophy behind thermal bathing: supporting yang without depleting yin, and treating warmth as medicine rather than indulgence. It's especially topical for the Year of the Fire Snake and for the ongoing online discourse around \"China-maxxing.\" The advice? Start slowly, keep practices gentle, and pay attention to how your body responds. Listen first, then act.
We love to see it.

\n\n

\n\n $\"The$ \n\n

\n\n

We spend so much time managing ourselves — optimising, scheduling, performing — that we forget the simplest thing: we live in bodies that are capable of extraordinary pleasure.

Not the kind that requires planning or expense. The kind that's already there, waiting. The heat of a bath. Oil on skin after a shower. The yield of a massage. A glass of wine that rewrites the tempo of an evening. The release of a real laugh.
39BC has been writing about these pleasures — one at a time, slowly, as they deserve. If you haven't read the series yet, start anywhere. There's no wrong door in.

\n\n\n

\n\n $\"Julia$ \n \n

Julia Philips

\n\n\n

On our Cultural Radar

Two exhibitions have opened in London that seem, between them, to have something urgent to say about what it means to inhabit a human body — specifically, a woman’s body.

At the Barbican, Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak fills the Curve with glazed masks, body casts, and metal contraptions that occupy an uneasy territory between medical instrument and sculpture. Phillips is interested in the body as a site of procedure and possibility — the interior life of it, the private theatre of it — rendered in forms that are simultaneously beautiful and faintly confrontational.

\n\n

\n $\"Tracey$ \n

Tracey Emin

\n\n

Across the river at Tate Modern, Tracey Emin: A Second Life spans forty years of a practice built on the radical refusal to separate the personal from the public. Love, desire, grief, sex, illness — the body as autobiography, laid bare without apology.

Together, the two exhibitions feel like a conversation. One interior, almost surgical. The other raw and incandescent. Both insisting that the female body has always been the site of serious art — and that we are still, in 2026, negotiating what that means.

If this week is about returning to the body, these are two very different — and very powerful — ways to do it.

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39BC Minis!

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\nA Note from Shar

I've just landed back from Japan, and my mind is still somewhere between a ryokan and a bullet train. More on that soon — but I came home seriously inspired and immediately went back to work on something I know you're going to love: minis of the full Vol I. Alexandria collection. All four scents, travel-ready, completely giftable. You people and your minis – you really love them! I see you, and I'm delivering.

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\n\n $\"Evening$ \n

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An evening of love at Selfridges

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Speaking of returning to the body — which is really what all of this is about — last week I gathered some of my favourite people for an evening at Corner Restaurant. It was a celebration of 39BC landing at Selfridges, which is a dream come true and honestly still feels surreal to say. Around the table: Nellie Eden, Vanessa White, Laura Jackson, Alice Casely-Hayford, Charlotte Roberts, Alex Brownsell, Christie Leigh Chung and Dom Chung, Alex Carl and more — the most beautiful room of friends, old and new. Jackson Boxer's space, a long table, 39BC's crimson flowers, rarebit croquettes and chocolate treacle cake. We laughed and drank and talked for hours. And everyone went home with 39BC products and an exquisite Eros print by still life photographer Joe Hume — a single red rose, shot in saturated close-up. The perfect parting gift.

And on the subject of Selfridges — we keep selling out, which is the most wonderful problem I've ever had. At the time of writing, only Fig Milk and Denarii are in stock. Catch them while you can!

Shar x

P.S. I shared my entire beauty routine with The Cut. All my rituals, all my secrets. I talk about why I wash my face with oil (obviously), how I eat for optimum skin health, and my twice-daily bathing routine. Go take a peek.

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