Before the Hollow: The Path That Led Me Here

Before there was an Obsidian Hollow, there was a path.

The Path That Led Me Here

I found it when I was lost.

In November 2016, I left my corporate job. Within weeks, I was sitting on the floor of my office surrounded by books, notes, ingredients, and possibilities. I was reading about essential oils and carrier oils, health and peace, bath and body products, and what it meant to care for yourself from the inside out. I started dreaming up recipes and teaching myself how to turn those ideas into something I could hold in my hands.

I called it True Path Apothecary.

The name came before I understood how much it would mean. At the time, making gave me somewhere to place my curiosity, my care, and the part of myself that needed to create. The Path became a guiding light. It was how I began finding my way back to myself.

True Path grew quickly from an idea into an entire world. I made soaps and candles, facial care and hair treatments, bath salts and body products, beard oils and lip balms. I designed labels, photographed products, assembled packaging, wrote descriptions, and carried tables full of handmade goods into holiday markets. I learned to think beyond individual products and imagine how they might belong together.

Some ideas became products. Some remained recipes, notes, or plans tucked away in what I called the Codex. But even the unfinished ones carried intention.

The thing I had forgotten

Years later, one of those forgotten ideas brought me to a complete stop.

It was a set of Women’s Monthly Cycle Bath Salts organized as Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. I had been reading a book that connected the phases of a woman’s cycle to the seasons, and I wanted to build products around those phases with carefully selected ingredients and essential oils. I never gave the idea the time it deserved. Eventually, I nearly forgot it existed.

Finding it again flooded me with memories of the girl sitting on her office floor, reading and dreaming up recipes. She was not trying to outdo anyone. She was not trying to satisfy an algorithm or find a gap in an overcrowded market. She was creating because something mattered to her. She wanted to make care tangible.

I needed to remember her.

The years between

True Path continued through products, markets, experiments, and seasons of making. Then life became busier, and the work became harder to hold. By 2023, my career demanded too much of me, and I entered a long hiatus.

What I missed most were candles, soaps, and aromatherapy.

There is a particular kind of magic in transforming an ordinary object. A bar of soap is something people use every day—but it can also become sculptural, fragrant, and beautiful. A candle can change the presence of a room before it is ever lit. Fragrance can follow someone through the day, linger on their skin, live in their home, and return them to a moment.

Those things can make an ordinary ritual feel personal. They can offer a small encounter with beauty when the world feels like it needs more of it.

That was what I missed: not merely producing things, but creating experiences people could carry with them.

The name that opened the door

When I decided to return, I thought I would simply redesign the True Path logo and continue where I had left off.

I tried. It never felt right.

It felt like I was pushing an old idea forward even though it no longer gave me enough passion, creativity, mystery, or room to grow. I moved through name after name, theme after theme, and several possible logos. Again and again, I found myself drawn toward something magical, botanical, mysterious, and a little witchy.

Then the name Obsidian Hollow came into the universe.

I knew, somewhere deeper than logic, that it was the one.

When I finally saw the name with the completed logo, I sank back into my seat and thought: THIS IS IT.

That was the moment I understood I was not refreshing True Path. I was building a new identity—one that could return to the things I loved without asking me to become the person I had been years earlier. The Hollow could hold the soaps, candles, botanicals, fragrance, care, and sensory storytelling that began on the Path. It could also hold darker beauty, stranger forms, practical objects, modern ingredients, and the knowledge I had gained since.

The important thing was that I finally gave myself permission to go all the way into the vision.

When intuition learned science

The distance between True Path and Obsidian Hollow is clearest in Copper Ritual.

Growing up, I did not think of myself as someone who was good at math, science, or chemistry. During the True Path years, I often added essential oils by the drop. I worked through heart, soul, feel, and smell. There was instinct behind it, but not always enough measurement.

Copper required something different from me.

I learned about facial serums and aqueous solutions, raw peptide powders and solubility ratios. I learned to weigh in grams, dissolve powders correctly, and incorporate them into a serum. I learned that adding a copper-peptide solution changes the base and changes what preservation must account for. I began working with glass beakers, magnetic stirrers, percentages, fragrance loads, throw temperatures, and hot-versus-cold addition methods.

I started learning science all over again—this time because I loved what it allowed me to create.

The intuition did not disappear. It learned science.

That is where the Hollow’s version of alchemy lives.

Peptide powders, vivid blue copper solution, beakers, careful ratios, and ingredients transforming inside a vessel genuinely feel a little like potion-making. I can joke about adding GHK-Cu as my “eye of newt,” but the science underneath is real. The magic does not replace technical responsibility. It gives the technical work an imaginative language—a world where formulation can be rigorous and still feel mysterious.

What returned—and what became new

Some OHA products consciously return to the old work. Ironroot revives a True Path beard oil that once sold beautifully, now with new scents, packaging, stability, and identity. Honed revisits my earlier soapmaking while becoming the companion to Quench. Coven brings back the candles, soaps, and lip balms I always wanted to make again, but transforms them through a world that is more magical, mystical, witchy, alchemical, and botanical.

Other products belong to knowledge I did not yet possess. The peptide serums feel especially at home in the Hollow because they could only emerge after years of learning. Carryalls finally make room for an old desire to create bags and useful handmade objects—something I once imagined for True Path but could not yet realize.

The products do not all share the same kind of ancestry. They do share the same maker.

Obsidian Hollow is not True Path dressed in darker packaging. It is not an erasure of True Path, either. It is what became possible when the original intention met more knowledge, more courage, and a world large enough to contain the whole vision.

The work beneath the work

What I want people to understand is the ancient history and purpose underneath all of it.

The intentionality.

The absolute love and care I pour into everything—from formulation and finding the right combination of ingredients to packaging, labels, photography, and the words used to introduce a product to the world.

I want to create things that are unique and beautiful, but uniqueness is not the deepest goal. I want people to feel special in their own way, every day. Maybe that happens when they first see a product. Maybe it happens while they use it, when a fragrance lingers on their skin, or when an object changes the feeling of a room. Maybe something I make inspires them to create, to care for themselves, or simply to notice beauty for a moment.

I want to gift people joy.

And I am still returning to myself through the work. Every label, recipe, fragrance accord, and experiment feels like another layer chipped away, revealing more of me underneath—my intention, my purpose, and the creative urge I had not felt in a very long time.

True Path was the light I found when I needed a way forward.

The Path led me into the Hollow, with all its enchanting mystery and beauty.

I do not know that there would be a Hollow without the Path.