Cosmic compass

Next week, we're working on getting our new website live. It will include my new Journal space, as well as some exciting new products. It will also showcase our new design of packaging, which feels so refreshingly aligned with where the brand now sits.

At the relaunch stage, please feel free to reach out and give your thoughts and opinions so that we can make sure we build the experience around exactly what you want and need from your skincare brand.

If you think I'm completely mad for speaking to the moon, just contemplate, for a moment, how nature works: with migrations determined by certain skies and a flower like jasmine ramping up its perfume at dusk because to attract its moth pollinator. This isn't some mad poetry; it’s biology and...survival. We’re part of that same design.

I read Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places this week and he describes how the landscapes he visits that are seemingly untouched by human hands — remote moors, deep forests, hidden valleys — awaken something elemental in us. They remind us that the earth has its own vast, ancient rhythms, unfolding with or without our interference. When we tune into cycles like the moon’s, we are, in a sense, doing the same thing: recognising the earth not as something to be managed or tamed, but as a living force that holds us.

Butterflies, for example, embody this truth in the most extraordinary way. Monarchs travel thousands of miles each year, navigating by the position of the sun and their own circadian clocks, to return to the very same patch of forest, generation after generation. Their journey is a reminder that the natural world carries maps and wisdom written into its very being, with nothing but unwavering trust in rhythm and light.

By focusing on these patterns, we begin to appreciate the wild rhythms within our own days: the way a tree bends towards moonlight, or how the air feels sharper on certain nights. Macfarlane shows us that the “wild places” aren’t always distant; sometimes they’re in the overlooked details, the spaces where human order loosens and nature reveals its quiet mastery — and, interestingly, he notes that: 

"We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, but the wild can still return us to ourselves."

When we allow ourselves to belong to these cycles, we remember that we are not separate. We too are elemental, called to navigate by forces greater than ourselves, finding our way back, always, to the same truths.

Even the most skeptical among us tend to notice that sleep feels different when the moon is full. Studies have shown that people fall asleep more slowly and sleep less deeply during the brightest nights. The body responds to light and rhythm, whether or not our minds want to explain it away.

When sleep feels elusive under a bright sky, perhaps the answer isn’t to fight it but to meet it differently. If the moon keeps us awake, maybe it’s less an interruption and more a reminder that we’re not meant to be machines, perfectly programmed for eight solid hours of sleep. We are cyclical, tidal and porous. And perhaps the best way to sleep under a full moon is to stop demanding it be the same as every other night, and instead allow the body to rest in rhythm with the cosmos.

A full moon sleep ritual to try:

• Step outside for two or three minutes before bed and let the moonlight touch your skin.
• Back inside, switch off overhead lights and light a single candle or lamp.
• Sip a calming tea (chamomile or lavender work well).
• Take ten slow breaths, lengthening each exhale.
• As you lie down, imagine the moon itself holding you, until sleep comes.

The body has its own eclipses — times when, without much warning, energy dips or symptoms flare. In those moments it’s so easy to panic, to feel betrayed by our own body, to demand answers and fixes. But often what’s really happening is something much more subtle: the body, under invisible strain, is asking us to pause.

Managing not to fear a flare-up has been hugely healing for me. I've learned to soften my grip on control, simply rest when my body asks and to let things pass in their own time. 

One of the most powerful mantras I learned from a brain-training programme I did still comes back to me in these moments:

“I am here in this now.”

It’s a reminder that I don’t need to be anywhere else — just here, in the present, letting the cycle unfold. Tomorrow is a new day.

All week I’ve been pulling from Maria Popova’s Almanac of Birds, and it drew me back to The Book of the Bird: Birds in Art — a gift from dear friends in 2017, when I was living in Singapore, which I hadn’t properly opened until now.

The book reveals, through stunning artworks both old and new, how birds are emblems of knowledge, messengers of mysticism and symbols of risk. The breaking of the egg is the first step into life; the leap from the cliff, the terrifying necessity of flight. Across cultures and centuries, artists return to birds as metaphors for what it means to begin, to trust and to launch into the unknown. For me, this is a meditation on freedom and fragility and the power to cross worlds with courage.