Christina Leitzel's fan base knows her as Christina Oculara.

Custom ice cubes. Prosthetic eyes. Perfumes with an air of mystery about them. These semiobscure crafts manage to be commercial items and works of art at the same time for the Portlanders who make and market them. And these niche items offer a chance for their creators to follow their dreams, even if their current careers have taken them down rabbit holes they couldn’t have imagined when they were growing up.

Christina Leitzel wasn’t always Christina Oculara. After she left Philadelphia—where she’d studied industrial design at the Art Institute and then become a board-certified ocularist—to take over an established health care practice in Northwest Portland, she used its name, the Center for Ocular Prosthetics, on social media. The obviously delicious riff on the singer Christina Aguilera came from one of Leitzel’s patients, who started calling her Christina Oculara in TikTok videos. When the patient’s many fans couldn’t find Leitzel online, she rebranded.

Combining health care, sculpture, and painting, the art and science of making artificial eyes might feel like a little-known trade. But for those who have lost eyes due to cancer, gunshots wounds, accidents, and other causes, it’s essential. Leitzel spends hours bonding with her patients, who often seek her out for “fun eyes,” creative prosthetics that allow for more self-expression. Her work can involve sparkles and other glam touches, lettering, tiny custom portraits, and other intricate designs.

Center for Ocular Prosthetics

Christina Oculara’s favorite fun eyes: A robot eye with a mirrored reflection, as well as a pink opal heart eye.
Most complicated fun eyes: Organic materials that don’t stand up to the pressure applied when molding an artificial eye are always a challenge. In 2009, Leitzel tried to make an eye using a honeybee’s body. “Wings don’t really work,” she says. But she recently made an eye using a scorpion body, which glows neon yellow-green in ultraviolet light. She was able to carve space to hold the scorpion in place, helping it withstand the pressure.
Most controversial eye: One that creates the illusion that the patient’s eye is pierced with a bar and ball piercing you’d see at Hot Topic. “She feeds my inner teenager,” Leitzel says of her patient. When the patient made a video pretending to get her eye pierced, Leitzel had her agree to include gratuitous warnings that the video was a theatrical fake, with no medical recommendation from anyone involved. Still, the video was duetted by eye doctors on TikTok who warned would-be patients not to pierce their eyeballs.
Least favorite material to work with: “Glitter is the worst thing on Earth,” Leitzel says.

“They start questioning, ‘Did I conform to society with my traditional eye, or was I forced into it, or did I ever have to do it?’” Leitzel says of some first-time clients. Often, she says, people who lost their eye in early childhood were “just told to be quiet, to just conform, to just go with the flow. And they haven’t had the time to process the actual trauma, so now they’re able to start processing, start talking with others about it and connect online with other people or [other patients].”

An initial fitting session can take six hours over two days for the client, while cleanings and check-ins might last only 10 minutes. “You never know how anyone is going to react,” says Leitzel, who’s done fittings where patients learn for the first time that their prosthetics aren’t supposed to feel uncomfortable.

Medical insurance doesn’t always cover costs associated with artificial eyes, and Leitzel has introduced patients to resources like the Crime Victims Fund, or as well as an effort she’s involved with called the Fun Eye Fund, which lists “showing the world that functionality and self-expression can coexist” as part of its mission.

The demand for her functional works of art can sometimes mean a wait. “I’m in it more for the longevity and long term of keeping my clients and making sure they’re happy than getting a quick turnaround time,” says Leitzel, whose relationship with a customer continues long after an eye is made, with maintenance. “If it’s not good, if it’s not feeling good, they’re going to tell people, especially with social media.”

PDX Ice founder Charles Hartz has no chill when it comes to custom cubes.

An early player in the craft cocktail ice movement who carves flawlessly clear ice cubes and sculptures for bars and events across the Pacific Northwest, Charles Hartz also relies on relationships. He went to culinary school and worked as an executive chef before he jumped into ice sculpting full-time in 2012. His company, PDX Ice, and his customer base both started with the connections he’d made working in restaurants.

“It was pretty scary,” Hartz says of ditching his traditional job (and reliable paycheck). “There were some months where it was like, ‘All right, are we going to make it? Should I go back to the chef world for a little bit?’ But I just stuck with it.” When the restaurant, entertainment, and event industries collapsed overnight in 2020, Hartz stayed in business by delivering ice to customers’ homes, as well as through grocery and liquor store distribution deals.

The internet might laugh at seeing a $12 bag of ice, but Hartz believes his customers—bars from Hood River to Salem to Bend, grocers, and Portland’s trendiest cocktail lounges—are buying “sculptures in a glass.” (PDX Ice’s products include a 10-pound bag that’s close to $4, too; the pricier bag you might see at the grocery store has oversize cubes or spheres.)

PDX Ice

Average weight of a precut PDX Ice block: 300 pounds
Water source: Washington County
Number of ice shapes: 3. The company offers perfect ice square and Collins-style rectangle cubes, as well as globe spheres, all of which hold their shape longer and melt slower than standard ice.
Most difficult project: Colored cubes and sculptures. The company’s agitation process during freezing removes all impurities to make the ice perfectly clear. Hartz says this includes colored dye. PDX Ice can make colored cubes, but they won’t be as perfectly crystal clear as their standard cubes.
Number of sister companies: 1. Hartz founded Blind Tiger Ice in 2018 in the Bay Area to access another market where PDX Ice’s hyperlocal label didn’t work as well. “Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon love their logos on cubes,” Hartz says. Blind Tiger Ice merged with Petaluma-based Abstract Ice in March.
What happens to scrap ice? Shavings and imperfect cuts are crushed into seafood or wedding buffet coolers, or they’re sold to construction companies to keep their water coolers chilled longer. Just because it doesn’t look pretty doesn’t mean it’s not still formulated to melt more slowly.

“If you use our ice for a wedding, it might be one of the smallest purchases, but it might get the most recognition if you have the couple’s initials on it with a heart around them,” Hartz says of PDX Ice’s popular etched cubes. “Everyone’s taking a picture of it and sharing it on Instagram. It’s a small investment for a wedding or corporate event, but it makes a big impact for what we do.”

“It has a magic to it,” Hartz says of his material of choice. “It shines through light differently; it looks different in a glass or on a pedestal as a sculpture. It constantly changes; it slowly changes throughout the night. Everyone wants to touch it. It’s this medium that has this cool factor—sorry.” The ephemeral works of art simply melt away when they’re no longer needed. Another plus: “There’s no cleanup like with wood chips.”

While the main ingredient in Hartz’s artworks is simple and local, perfume company Imaginary Authors sources its materials—and its inspirations—from all over the world. Perfumer Josh Meyer blends and tests scents in the lab, and cofounder Ashod Simonian researches the regions ingredients come from, learning about their literary tropes and traditions to craft a convincing backstory and a properly novelistic name. Treated like a carefully crafted work of fiction, each scent comes with a synopsis. Meyer and Simonian’s efforts have grown the 11-year-old brand into one of niche luxury perfume’s most coveted labels, with a devoted following that spans cultural and gender identities.

Imaginary Authors

Number of fragrances: 19 perfumes currently (including refined blends)
Fastest fragrance: Blend No. 83—a collaborative project with liquor brands Absolut and Kahlúa—was shaken, not stirred, together in two months’ time. Developing a new fragrance usually takes six months to a year.
Newest fragrance: The Language of Glaciers, a crisp, wintry scent that bottles a snowy, piney mountain, like air rushing through your nose as you glide down a slope. (Simonian hinted in March that a new perfume could be out by summer, but he wasn’t ready to share details.)
Most popular fragrances: Bull’s Blood was one of Imaginary Authors’ first and most divisive perfumes, discontinued when a central ingredient was no longer available, and then refined last year. A Whiff of Waffle Cone, the company’s first collaboration with Salt & Straw, has also been a top seller.
Learning curves: Simonian says that Imaginary Authors’ lower-selling perfumes don’t get a new batch if they lag for too long, but it’s hard to gauge as the brand grows. L’Orchidee Terrible was an early perfume that Meyer discontinued by Imaginary Authors’ third year. Mosaic, a collaboration with Spruce Apothecary, also saw waning interest whenever it was released. Whispered Myths— its scent notes include Cambodian oud, cantaloupe, cedarwood, muskdana, honey, and “salvaged shipwreck”—might be discontinued due to low sales by the time you read this.
Weirdest fragrances: Imaginary Authors’ second collaboration with Salt & Straw was a trio of edible perfumes designed to be sprayed on ice cream and other foods. So you can wear your fragrance and eat it, too.

Simonian, who recently left an ad agency career to work full-time as Imaginary Authors’ creative director, says that connecting with and listening to customers is a key to the company’s success.

“Part of it is trying to truly be part of these communities, to have these friendships with the queer community [for example], and real conversations about what people want and how we could be better,” Simonian says. “It’s coming from my history of playing in bands. It’s about building community, embracing diversity, and spreading love no matter what.”