Heroines of the ice

"Can't you just use AI? Or at least shoot in a warm studio with fake snow?" My friends love the idea of this season's muse: the brave, female Polar explorer. But to literally follow in her footsteps for our campaign photography? Insanity. Yet here we are. Deep in the Arctic circle with only a few minutes of daylight left. At -19°C, every second counts for our lingerie-clad model Aneta, who is shivering in the snow. The huskies jumping around her are too restless to stay in the shot. Should we stop? This is crazy! But all of a sudden, she picks up a puppy and starts to cuddle it. The rest of the pack soon falls under her spell, and through my viewfinder I see a radiant woman, thriving despite - or perhaps because of! - the cold. A winter goddess.

The cold really puts a magnifying glass on a person's character. Do you break, or break through your own limitations? The Inuit have a saying: 'you never really know your friends from your enemies until the ice breaks'. One of my major takeaways from researching the lives of dozens of formidable Polar adventurers is: you never really know your own strengths and weaknesses until you journey into the cold.

One amazing example of the power of (self-)exploration is Bernice Notenboom. The first Dutch woman to conquer the South Pole on skies and the second one to climb to the top of the Mount Everest, she recently turned 60 recently during a grueling expedition. Bernice told me how her next challenge will actually take place off the ice: a double knee replacement that may end her exploration dreams. "I don't know how I will recuperate. But I'll try to be flexible so I can change with the change. I thank the ice for that precious lesson," she said.

Another woman who knows a thing or two about bravely entering the unknown is Dutch actress and writer Isa Hoes, who wrote a moving account of her breast cancer journey. "Forced to think about life and death, I started wondering: have I been living my life to the fullest? The answer was no," she told me. Her advice to any woman going through a big change: "Keep an open heart and explore new paths. And who knows? You may even learn a thing or two about yourself."

Sensuality is another very important area for self-discovery. As Dutch sexpert and sex-toy designer Rianne Swierstra told me during a fun, inspiring Zoom call: "By taking charge of their pleasure in the bedroom, women empower themselves in other areas of their lives as well." I couldn't agree more, of course, and my Awaken Your Senses collections are designed with exactly that goal in mind: to help women find the power in their pleasure.

Meanwhile, in the world's Northernmost whisky distillery, Aneta has been posing in a hot pink AYS set in the freezing cold among casks of whiskey (after all, the collection's theme is 'Stay Juicy'). "That's a wrap!" I say, as crew members rush to cover Aneta in heated blankets. Grateful, she says: "We did it! Wow, what amazing teamwork!". And how right she is. Working in the extreme cold under extreme pressure - the sun sets at 2 pm each day - we have been holding each other up as a team. If one of us would have given up, the whole shoot would have fallen apart. Instead, we became one in our effort. Many great Polar explorers have credited their crew's camaraderie as the main reason for their survival. I understand them a lot better now. And perhaps this sense of interconnectedness is exactly what our polarized society needs right now. Gazing into the Polar night, I see it quite clearly: in the cold, barren, unmapped territories of our lives, we're all just walking each other home.