Bright Black

Candle Stores, Fragrance Store in Durham, NC

Address

2020 Chapel Hill Rd, Durham, NC, 27707

Website

brightblackcandles.com

About Bright Black

Bright Black is a family-run fragrance studio in Durham, North Carolina, that uses scent as a medium and candles as a platform for telling positive stories about Blackness. Tiffany M. Griffin and Dariel Heron started making candles together as a couples activity while they were dating, and built the company around their daughter Elena: her name means "the bright one," Tiffany's means "an illuminating discovery," and Heron is a bird many cultures know as the creator of light. They chose the name to pair Black — a word that so often carries a negative connotation — with Bright, meaning beauty, brilliance, and intelligence. Griffin, the CEO, holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan and worked as a senior strategic advisor at USAID and on health policy in the US Senate before founding the company. Heron, the COO, leads artisanship and production, and came from management and operations at Landmark Theaters. The candles are handcrafted in 7.5 oz vessels from 100% coconut and soy wax. The Diaspora Collection names its scents for cities — Addis Ababa, Durham, Kingston, Paris, Salvador — and the Genres Collection for music and spirit: Bachata, with notes of passion fruit and mahogany; Gospel, with chamomile, lilac and myrrh; plus Hip Hop, Rock and Yemanja. Both are sold as six-candle discovery sets, and the studio also makes body fragrance oils, a moisturizing body oil, and a skincare collaboration with the Durham refillery Fillaree. The company has collaborated with the NBA, Michelle Obama, and Jordan Peele's HBO team, and has been featured in more than 100 outlets including Beyoncé's Black Parade, Vogue, NPR and Durham Magazine. Its Chapel Hill Road showroom runs custom scent experiences, and the candles are carried by shops across the Triangle and as far as New York and Washington DC. Community is treated as a verb here: limited-edition candles fund causes, including a 2021 release that gave 60% of net online sales to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth.

Bright Black was built around a vision of a world where the complexity, beauty, and brilliance of Blackness is widely known, recognized, embraced, and celebrated. The studio's stated mission is to make and share high-quality products that honor the Black Diaspora, which is reflected in candle and fragrance collections named after cities and cultural touchstones across the diaspora, from Addis Ababa to Kingston to Durham itself. Bright Black commits to running its business consciously, guided by values of inter-being, cooperative economics, respect, and creativity.

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