How the business started.
I started Unicorn Fairy Circles in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, because I was crocheting mask-holders by the dozen and the Etsy shop needed a name. I wanted something that sounded like whimsy incarnate — fairy circles, the mushroom rings in folklore, plus a unicorn for good measure. The candles came later.
The first candle was a solo experiment, a single jar of lavender-infused beeswax I made for myself to see whether I could do it. The fifth candle was still for me. By the twentieth I understood there was something here worth paying attention to, and I started writing down the temperatures.
My background.
I started in religious studies at a Church of Christ seminary. I earned a degree in psychology. I did graduate work in sustainability. I spent years working on accessibility at Fortune 500 companies — making websites work for people with disabilities, compliance reports, the whole unglamorous but necessary thing. I learned, over a long stretch, that I don't belong to one system. I eventually found my way to universalism — not as a rejection of earlier traditions but as a result of paying attention to all of them.
This matters for these candles because it's where the scholarship comes from. I don't casually quote Hildegard of Bingen; I read her. I don't reference Greek etymology as a flavor; I look it up. I don't write about a herb's traditional use unless I can find it in more than one source.
I'm not a witch. My partner is.
People ask. I'll answer once and then let the candles speak.
I'm a universalist — not a witch, and I never will be. It isn't unwillingness to dabble. It's that becoming a witch would require becoming someone I'm not. The shape doesn't fit me, and it never could; if I tried to take that path, I'd lose something essential about who I am. So I don't. My partner is a practicing witch, though his practice is a daily craft, not a religion — more like a gardener's relationship to the garden than a worshipper's to the church. Watching him has taught me a lot about what care for a practice looks like from the inside, and I have deep respect for every serious school of witchcraft.
The same logic runs the other way. I'm not exclusively a Christian either, though I have deep respect for Christian tradition — I'll quote its thinkers, read its herbalists, and present its relevant truths carefully when they belong in what I'm writing. Same with every school of witchcraft. Same with monastic herbalism, Greek etymology, Ayurvedic tradition, modern pharmacognosy. A universalist stance doesn't mean I hold every tradition as equally mine — I don't. It means I take every tradition seriously enough to study it before I speak about it, and to present it properly when it holds a truth worth passing along. That isn't dabbling. It's the opposite: dabbling takes shortcuts; universalism does the reading.
So when a candle optionally ships (at no charge, opt-in at checkout) with a small herb-education card framed either through research and documented traditional use, or through universalist-faith language rooted in the contemplative herbal traditions, I'm not doing it as a marketing split. I'm doing it because I know a candle in a secular home and a candle in a faith-held home are both being asked to do real work, and I want education to sit alongside the candle, there to support whatever the person brings to the flame — never required, never in the way.
AuDHD, hyperfocus, the good kind.
I'm autistic and ADHD. The two together can be ungovernable in some directions, and in others they produce the kind of focus that reads papers on infusion chemistry at midnight because the question of exactly how the aromatic compounds in thyme behave in hot beeswax has become the most interesting thing in the world for three weeks.
"Hyperfocus Infusions" is the collection name because it's also what the candles are. Each one represents a period of mine spent learning a single plant in enough detail that I could then make a candle that wasn't just scented with it, but built around it.
Years of study across different traditions have taught me that the more I learn, the more I find out is still out there for me to learn. True knowledge is endless. The more knowledgeable someone becomes, the less confident they are that they know everything — because they've gone down too many roads only to find more paths branching out from each one. Knowledge is like the tree of life that way.
Where I live.
Louisiana, in Bogalusa, in a house with a workroom that has shelves of beeswax and glass jars of dried herbs and DigiBoils for melting. Outside the window, south Louisiana light. My partner is here. My family is in Texas, just over the line.
The household is a small zoo. Luna the firecat supervises from the perch of her choice, judgmentally. Little Miss Daisy, our scruffy dog, supervises less rigorously. Blu the untamed escape artist and Void the unnamed whole problem are our two foster pits, and I already suspect they're going to turn into foster fails — you know how that goes. And on my desk, Lotlie Blossom: a crocheted axolotl I picked up at a farmers market earlier this year, since promoted to emotional-support stuffie. She holds down a lot of the quiet hours.
What I care about in this business.
Accessibility. I spent years making the web usable for people with disabilities, and I've made great strides in making and keeping this store accessible. I plan to keep at it. If something here isn't working for your accessibility tools, please tell me — fixing those issues, wherever I can, is important to me.
A healthy supply chain. I obsess over the sustainability of what goes into these candles. I prefer organics. I look for fair-trade certifications. I choose trusted suppliers over the absolute cheapest ones, every time. The goal is that every link in the chain — the people growing the plants, the people handling them in between, and the people eventually lighting the candle — ends up socially and environmentally healthier for the exchange, not worse off.
Spiritual honesty and stewardship. My true goal is to make sure these candles are adequately prepared to live up to the specifications of a wide audience. Not because I think marketing to a large group is good business (it's not) but because they are genuinely good tools for anyone — from a devout Christian settling into a Bible study, to an atheist lighting a candle before a meditation, and the infinite variations of life in between. I reference contemplative herbalism, folk practice, and modern research openly, naming each where it comes from. Where two plants share a common name but belong to distinct cultural lineages, I'll tell you which one is in the candle and why the distinction matters. My job is to respect the traditions I encounter and share what I have learned, not to claim one is better than the other or that I have invented any of it.
The intention is yours to build, not mine. People have asked me to load their candles for them — to trace a spell into the wax, to weave a specific intention in during making, to do the spiritual work on their behalf. I decline, and for reasons that matter to me. A candle loaded for one belief would no longer be as welcome in another, and I want these candles to sit comfortably in my mother's house, in my brother's house, and on anyone else's altar alike — and I'd have to come at that kind of work completely blind anyway. How you approach meditation, the divine, your focus, your needs, is intensely personal. Your own spiritual guides — be they preacher, priest, shaman, or simply the universe — are far better suited to that work than I am. I'd rather make a spectacular candle and honor its ingredients and my process. The meaning belongs to you.
A candle is a tool, not a result. Lavender doesn't cure anxiety; it's associated in modern clinical research with mild effects on sleep and mild anxious states. That's meaningful, and it's what I'll say. If you want something that smells pleasant and steadies a room while you do the rest of the work, I'm your candlemaker. If you want a cure, I'm not.
The essays.
The long-form writing I do on the business lives in a series called the Unmasked Candlemaker. It's where I work out what I'm doing, in public, with receipts. Topics covered so far: why I strain the herbs (and how to safely handle a candle with embedded herbs if you end up with one — the short version: watch it closely, or safer yet, use it flameless), why small-batch candles cost what they cost, what a badly-held infusion temperature does to the aromatic compounds in mugwort, the specific chamomile I use and why.
Read the Unmasked Candlemaker series →
That's about as short as I know how to make this and still be honest.
— Debra, Bogalusa, Louisiana