Some scents you make. Some scents have been with you so long that by the time you put them in a bottle, they already know who they are.
Balsam and Clementine is one of those. It's one of the few scents we still make that's actually older than Pure Placid itself.
| "I wanted a scent that was true to the Adirondacks — and true to the feeling the mountains give you." |
A summer at the lakeside pool
Long before there was a store on Main Street, there was a kid at the Whiteface Inn pool — me — swimming through long Adirondack summers.
The pool was ringed with cedar trees. I used to pick the leaves off the lowest branches, crush them between my fingers, and rub them on my wrists like perfume. That was my first scent memory. Not roses. Not vanilla. Cedar leaves at the edge of a lakeside pool.
Clementines were always my favorite hike snack. Easy to pack. Bright enough to wake you up after a long climb. That's where Balsam and Clementine begins. Not in a workshop. In a memory.
Built for a treatment room
I made the first version of this scent in my spa years — long before Pure Placid existed. I was a massage therapist for fifteen years, and I wanted to build a treatment oil and lotion for my clients that didn't smell like anyone else's. I wanted it to smell like here.
What I was after was a specific feeling — the one you get from a full day in the mountains. Reset, but not buzzed. Grounded, but not heavy. The kind of calm where you can still feel the trail in your legs.
Why balsam. Why clementine.
Balsam is summer to me. It's the smell of evergreen warmth — sun-warmed needles, woods after rain, the trees that line the trails I grew up on. Balsam is the place.
Clementine is the trail snack. The bright top note that opens your eyes and lifts the corners of your mouth. Clementine is the moment.
Together, they're a morning. Specifically — the kind of morning where you wake up early, the air is still cool, the lake is glass, and you can hear a few birds.
It became a whole little family
What started as an oil and a lotion for my treatment clients has grown into one of the largest collections we make. Balsam and Clementine now lives across six products — a candle, a bar soap, a hand soap, a body wash, a lotion, and a room spray. It moves through your day in whatever form fits.
A tool to claim your calm
That's what I've been trying to make all along — not just a scent, but a tool. Something small and beautiful you can pick up on a stretched-too-thin Tuesday afternoon, light a match to, and use to find your way back to yourself.
Scent isn't decoration. Scent is a doorway. And the doorway Balsam and Clementine opens is one I keep walking through, thirteen years later, because it still works.
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Balsam and Clementine → Shop the collection |