(announcements are organized from most recent to least recent — old announcements will be archived 1 month after date of post)

NOVEMBER 14TH

Hello and welcome back 🌿

Before I get to anything else, I just want to say thank you for all the support & patience while I’ve been navigating health issues and challenges in my personal life. The kindness and support folks have extended to me this year is immense. I wish I had a better way to express myself, but the best I can do is to say I'm grateful down to my bones to have so many folks care 💕

For info about the limited re-open, feel free to skip down to that section! Otherwise, I want to share some info on what was going on & why Osmo is opening the way it is.

**(cw for discussion of medical issues and mention of heavy life things)**

Sometimes I struggle with what to keep private vs. public, and where that intersects with the professional and personal aspects of running an indie perfume business. Honestly, I'd love to write more about that in a longer blog post at some point, but for now, I'm saying it because I want to approach this both professionally (because Osmo is a business) and also authentically (because Osmo is also the artistic extension of me as a person). That's honestly a hard dynamic to navigate, but transparency is also really really important to me, so I don't want to just... re-open without acknowledging the chaotic way the shop closed.

At the time, I thought my memory issues, health problems, and steep decline in mental health were due to an underlying neurological disorder and the impact of a family member's terminal diagnosis. Those were both true, but I've since discovered that most of the issues were actually the result of long-term carbon monoxide poisoning.

A month or two ago, my stove was identified as the culprit—it was spitting out genuinely insane amounts of carbon monoxide and unburnt gas, and has been probably the entire time I've had it. The CO alarms never went off, so I was pretty consistently inhaling a dangerous amount of CO every day for more than a year.

Unfortunately, the effects are cumulative as CO builds up in blood. It got so bad and went undetected for so long that I was being evaluated for, no joke, early onset dementia (as well as a spinal cord injury, a variety of degenerative mobility disorders, and others). Since replacing my stove and getting medical support, it's gotten dramatically better, but the brain damage caused by chronic CO poisoning is permanent, and the only way to find out which effects are permanent is to just... wait and see.

I'm sharing this for two reasons!

First, I'm starting to see the full scope of just how chaotically I handled the shop closing. I felt out of my mind at the time, and now I need to clean up the mess that came out of it. The way Osmo closed was, in all honesty, a wreck.

Second, I genuinely don't know what my capabilities are for running the shop these days. Even though I'm doing a lot better, some things don't seem to be improving. Mobility issues impact my ability to fill bottles and package orders, and my memory/ability to think are both slower and less reliable. As much as I want to jump back into Osmofolia, I can't run it like I used to, and it's going to take a really long time for me to figure out what works.

As good as it would be to just leave the shop closed til things are settled, Osmo is my main source of income. I'm not done mending the issues I left unhandled, but the shop is re-opening so that I stay afloat and simultaneously work on righting the ship.

So! That brings me to:

Re-Opening Details

The catalog right now is quite limited compared to our usual offerings! That's by design—fewer scents means fewer things for me to keep track of.

In the same vein, I will not be offering samples for purchase right now. There will be one free sample included in each order, but no other freebies or samples will be provided, and the scent will not be requestable. (This also means no birthday bottles, unfortunately.)

Open neck closures will also not be available as an option for purchase. If you request an open neck in the order notes, I'm happy to throw in the correct number of open neck caps, but the bottles will be shipped with rollerballs.

The cost of a lot of things has also gone up since this spring, so there are a couple of pricing changes. Free shipping will only be available for orders over $100. Furthermore, the price of most scents have been raised (a couple were lowered). The price increase is intended to help me re-build my inventory of supplies, from ingredients to bottles to shipping. This is temporary—Osmofolia scents are still available at the usual prices through Ajevie and a couple of other avenues (more below)! The scents I'm offering will also be restocked with Ajevie, so paying the slightly higher price for now is an optional way to support the re-opening of the shop.

In lieu of the usual # of weeks turnaround, all orders will be shipped by November 30th.

The other reason I'm calling this a limited open is that I don't have a timeline for restocking. Right now everything listed is pre-bottled, and all restocks will be played by ear.

And, there are four new scents! The first three are the finished scents I had intended for Pride:

Joy, Joy, Joy!

A love letter to the joy of self-transformation, and to the people who embody it: shimmering Lake Superior agates washed in lake water, sips of sour-sweet passionfruit juice shared on a hot day, mossy white cedar trees, sweet wafts of summer linden, and the lush, infinite greenness of the world around us.

Lavender Menace

A fearless queer fougère: eight lavenders balanced with tonka and oakmoss, a bouquet of fresh-plucked carnations, the acrid burn of gunpowder softened by warm vanilla, and a lively disrespect for most forms of authority.

Genderpunk

Subversion, and rebellion! Gas tank fumes in a mechanic shop, bourbon vanilla, sun-warmed vetiver, a bandana stained with motor oil, a fresh pack of candy cigarettes, and crystallized ginger. Not for the faint of heart—this is a scent that opens with a challenge rather than an invitation.

In place of our usual charitable giving, $1 per bottle sold of these scents will be donated to local queer and trans support organizations in Minneapolis.

~

The fourth scent is especially dear to me—it's the result of a three year scent study of grief, of love, and of Minnesota in the fall.

The Decomposition of It All

The rot happened in such slow motion that we hardly noticed it happening at all. A depiction of a pair of maple leaves as they fall, change colors, dry out, and eventually surrender into earth.

Finally, our scents are available in other places!

Ajevie has most of the general catalog, the duets, and the cozy & dangerous scents, as well as samples of almost all of those. They do have the Pride scents, but as of right now, The Decomposition of It All is only available through the Osmofolia shop.

Smith & Trade Mercantile in Stillwater, MN has some of our scents, all in EDP format. Their inventory will be restocked on Monday. They do sell online, but if you live in the area, you can go in and smell in person!

I think that's all for now. I'm still working my way through all the emails I've received—and if there are any issues with your order, anytime from January 2024 to now, absolutely feel free to reach out. Unresolved order issues are my top priority right now, and I want to make sure those don't go unaddressed. But you can also reach out with any other questions or concerns! I'm triaging messages and will get to all of them as soon as I'm able.

Also... it's good to be back. I'm really looking forward to sharing smells again 💕

Sending you warmth,

~Sab