Lily Ray.

The Composer of Woodland Fibers.

I am in a committed and long-standing love affair with olfaction. Our story started eight years ago. Where I lived at the time, burning incense wasn’t allowed, so I’d sneak off to smell things in secret. Like all good young folk, I burned a lot of incense—the cheap kind, the kind full of phthalates, synthetic fragrances, and VOCs. Once I learned of these chemical compositions I sat down, stuck a bunch of plants together with peach jam, and created my first blend. It smelled horrid, burned even worse, and I had officially fallen in love. Ever since, I have been blending, refining, and creating scents in the form of smoke.

To create these blends, I use flowers, foliage, resins, woods, and fragrant liquids sourced from local businesses, grown in my garden, or ethically foraged. I am a licensed herbal practitioner. I am a college student who studies the psychology of scent. This incense is my blend of neuroscience and nature. Scent is the only sense that bypasses the cerebral cortex—the brain’s center for conscious thought—and goes straight to the limbic system, the area responsible for memory and emotion. This makes the act of smelling inherently unconscious; we don’t think about scent, we feel it, we catalog it, it shapes who we are, and 92% of this happens at a subconscious level.

This brand is a combination of my formal education and my mystical curiosities. In the absence of spoken dialogue, these blends are a mechanism of remembrance, a profession of love, and simply, a way of being.