There are three reasons we chose the name 39BC.

The first belongs to history. In many books, “nothing happened” that year. But that silence is precisely the point. History tends to preserve what men did — wars, treaties, governments. Yet in 39BC, Cleopatra VII was ruling Egypt, raising three children, and reshaping her kingdom.

Her twins by Mark Antony were toddlers. Her son by Julius Caesar was already heir. And when Antony abandoned her to marry Octavian’s sister, Cleopatra did not collapse. She governed. She stabilized Egypt’s economy, expanded her navy, secured trade routes, and strengthened her people. The year may appear blank in Roman records, but for Cleopatra — and for Egypt — it mattered. It still matters.

The second reason is personal. On her own 39th birthday, our founder Sharmadean Reid felt a shift. She woke with a sense of peace that she had not known before. She celebrated with what she then called a “goddess party,” surrounded by women, ancestry, and ritual. Cleopatra died at 39. For Sharmadean, this was when she felt reborn. A moment of clarity, groundedness, and pleasure. That energy stayed, and became part of this brand.

The third reason is political. The year 39BC was itself a hinge in history. Cleopatra and Antony’s alliance could have shifted Rome’s trajectory. Had they lived and ruled, perhaps Rome would never have become empire. Without Rome as blueprint, the Senate House, the White House, even the British Empire may have looked very different. The structures we take as inevitable might never have existed.

So 39BC means three things at once:

• A forgotten year in the record of men, yet a decisive one for a queen.
• A personal turning point, a rebirth into grounded presence.
• A threshold in history — the moment before empire.

That is what is held in our name. It is history, memory, and ritual, carried into the present.

It is also what shapes our products. Each of our Cleansing Shower Oils is both archive and ceremony. They draw from Cleopatra’s world but are designed for modern life — turning daily bathing into a moment of return.

Discover Fig Milk, a luxury ritual shower oil inspired by intimacy observed in Alexandria’s palaces. Creamy fig, violet leaf, and coconut merge into a fragrance that lingers like memory on the skin.

Because at 39BC, nothing is forgotten. Not history. Not presence. Not pleasure.