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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
