The name is a date. 39 BC, Alexandria — somewhere in the middle of the decade Cleopatra and Mark Antony spent in each other’s company, in a city where bathing was not something you hurried through on the way to somewhere better.
39BC is London-founded and made in the UK, and it does one thing. Four oil body cleansers, 280ml each, £39. No serums, no candles, no diffusers, no sprawl. Just four scents built around a single city and a single idea, which is that washing is worth doing slowly.
That idea has a structure to it. This is Vol. I: Alexandria — a launch collection with a number on it, which tells you there will be a Vol. II, and that each one will take its cue from a different city and a different way of bathing. Rome had its bathhouses, Japan its onsens, North Africa its hammams. 39BC has begun with Alexandria and four scents, and left itself somewhere to go next.
Four oil body cleansers · 280ml · £39 each · Vol. I: Alexandria · Made in the UK · At Selfridges
What an oil cleanser actually does
Most body washes are water first and lather second. These are oil. The formula goes on genuinely slippery, turns milky the moment it meets water on damp skin, and rinses off without the greasy film you might be bracing yourself for. It is around 85% natural, and made without SLS, SLES, parabens, phthalates, mineral oil, silicones, PEGs or microplastics.
The difference shows up afterwards, in what you are left standing in. A foaming gel is designed to lift everything off, which is efficient and slightly puritanical about it. An oil cleanser is built to clean while leaving something behind — softness, and a light trail of scent that lingers past the towel. Which is why these sit closer to fragrance than to bathroom supplies, and why £39 stops looking quite so eccentric.
Vol. I: Alexandria — the four scents
Fig Milk — wild fig and violet leaf
Figs arrived in Egypt, Greece and Rome loaded with meaning — fertility, pleasure, abundance, nothing in the least bit shy about any of it. The scent is accordingly lush: creamy, green at the edges, sun-warmed rather than sugared. 39BC calls it the lightest of the four, and it is the obvious place to begin if you are undecided. It is also the one that turned up in the Vogue Festive Advent Calendar 2026, and it is easy to see why — of the four, it is the one most likely to be liked straight away.
Silk Veil — tuberose, jasmine and musk
The most openly perfumed of the four, and the least apologetic. White florals are a commitment: tuberose in particular does not do quiet, and jasmine has never once entered a room discreetly. A soft musk underneath keeps the whole thing from tipping into something you’d find on a dressing table in 1987. This is the one to reach for when you want the shower to do the work of a fragrance.
Denarii — frankincense, pepper and woods
Named for Roman coin, and frankincense was a currency of its own sort: Boswellia resin carried out of the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, once among the most valuable things traded anywhere. It opens bright and almost citrusy, then settles into something resinous and low. Altars, warm stone, dry air. The most serious of the four, and the one that reads least like a beauty product.
Sage Water — petrichor, mineral, wet stone
Petrichor is the word Australian scientists coined in the 1960s for the smell of rain landing on dry earth, and it is exactly right here. Moss, cool mineral, the inside of a ruin after weather. It is the least conventionally pretty of the four and comfortably the most interesting — it belongs to the same lineage as the great chypres, all damp forest floor and green shade. If one of these is going to become a signature, it will be this.
Does it pique our interest?
Ritual is a word that gets thrown about loosely in beauty, usually meaning nothing more than twice daily. 39BC means the older version of it — bathing as the thing that separates the day you have just had from the evening in front of you, a deliberate line drawn across the middle of the day. That framing is why the collection is structured as a volume rather than a range, and why each scent has been given a story rather than a shade name.
What we find most persuasive is the restraint. Four products is an act of confidence. There is no hedging, no sixteen variations of the same fig, no extension into hand wash and candle and room spray before the brand has even established what it smells like. It has decided what it is, said it clearly, and left room to say something else next time.
Who it’s for
You will like these if scent is part of how you get dressed rather than an afterthought, if you have ever bought a body wash because of how it smelled rather than what it promised to do, and if the idea of a bath as a full stop at the end of the day sounds like sense rather than indulgence. If you want something brisk, unscented and functional to keep by the shower, you might prefer to spend your £39 elsewhere and save these for the evenings that deserve them.
Shop the 39BC Vol. I: Alexandria collection at Selfridges →
Watch our run-through of the Vogue Festive Advent Calendar 2026, where Fig Milk makes an appearance
Read next
- Vogue Festive Calendar 2026 review — the calendar Fig Milk appears in
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