Artful Endeavours: Inside the Imaginative World of Petals & Poison
Behind the gothic jewellery brand is a multidisciplinary artist with an appetite for creative exploration
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Jená Bhone always has another idea brewing; her creative résumé speaks to an eagerness to explore new possibilities and the courage to pursue them.
The founder of Petals & Poison began her career creating storyboards for Disney alongside painting doll heads at her parents' dining room table. She's since transformed her affection for Victorian antiques into an independent gothic brand specializing in heirloom-quality jewellery, artfully designed teaware and limited-run clothing. Most recently, she's embraced fragrance and tea blending as new creative outlets, adding a new dimension of sensory-led atmospheric storytelling experiences.
Each pursuit offers a new creative challenge, though there's a common thread running through them all: Jená knows how to build a world worth getting lost in.
Since founding Petals & Poison in 2014, she's developed her signature Nu Antiques aesthetic around an appreciation for historical craftsmanship with her designs feeling as though they carry stories of their own.
We caught up with Jená to revisit the early experiments that started it all. She reflects on her adventures in artistic entrepreneurship and offers a glimpse of what might come next for Petals & Poison.
35 Dark Feminine Fragrances: The Collector’s Guide
Curating a perfume cabinet stocked with a haunted selection of elegant scents
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
A well-chosen perfume behaves like a small portal. One mist alters the atmosphere. The room remains the same, yet something shifts. Suddenly the evening carries the suggestion of somewhere else. A garden after midnight. Salt wind from distant water. The memory of old houses lined with books.
The fragrances in this cabinet operate exactly this way. Each one offers a different passage into the world it evokes.
The Gothic Aromancer: Legend-Led Fragrance with Cursed
Inside Cursed, redefining fragrance through story-led composition
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Betrayed by the endless parade of luxury beauty counters and their soul-less, cookie-cutter curations, she was tirelessly searching for a fragrance that could mirror her darkness.
Light fractured across mirrored displays as she moved from counter to counter, the air thick with sweetness that clung and collapsed all at once. Bottles gleamed in identical rows, each promising something unforgettable, each dissolving before it could take hold. The scent shifted, blurred, soured and disappeared.
She was searching for something with depth. A cemetery after midnight. A raven stationed above. The carnivorous presence of a mid-century vampire moving through a crowded room, unnoticed but unmistakable.
Just as she began to abandon all hope, something sinful appeared in the distance. A evil flicker. A ominous glow. The air shifted as she approached, sweetness falling away. It was strange. Unsettling. Positively haunted. This is exactly what she was looking for.
From within, Cursed, the gothic Aromancer spoke, not in formulas, but in consequence. We listened as the process revealed itself: scent summoned from narrative, notes chosen for what they imply as much as what they are, compositions built slowly until the air feels altered.
Consider this your invitation into a world where each elixir is drawn from the air of aftermath, doomed from the moment it is composed. Complex and unforgettable.