The lighter is perhaps the most democratic object in existence: it costs little, gets lost often, and is never really chosen. Hot Lunch decided to change that. The Los Angeles-based studio, born from the intersection of Sample and Forth+Back — an industrial and a graphic design studio respectively — took the classic BIC lighter and transformed it into something to desire, collect, and display.

The project is a series of lighter cases produced in small batches through rapid manufacturing: each cover completely redraws the lighter’s silhouette, from form to colour, with a precise logic. There’s the model with an octagonal body in pastel yellow, clean and almost minimalist. The red one with vertical grooves evoking a miniature architectural column. The blue one with a sinuous, wavy silhouette, the acid green with a double-sphere stacked body, and a brown one that explicitly references a billiard ball — number 14 included. Different forms, a bold palette, one thread running through all of them: nostalgia as a design language.

Hot Lunch works on what it calls «everyday rituals» — those small, repeated gestures we usually overlook. The idea is that even the most ordinary objects deserve formal attention, and that design can intervene without necessarily making them serious. The lighter cases sit on the boundary between functional object and collectible, between product design and pop material culture. They fit in your pocket, but they look just as good on a shelf.