The Scratch-and-Sniff Sticker That Started Everything

I was eleven years old, sitting in a math class, and I could feel it starting.

The tightening in my chest. The way the room felt suddenly too bright and too loud and too small. My heart speeding up in that particular way that meant: something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong.

I had anxiety as a kid. Not the kind anyone had a name for yet — this was the early nineties — but the kind that showed up in classrooms and car rides and anywhere I couldn't control what happened next. The kind that would arrive without warning and leave me trying to look normal while my nervous system ran full emergency protocols.

And then I found a scratch-and-sniff sticker in my desk.

The Sticker

I don't know why I scratched it. Distraction, probably. But it smelled like grapes — that specific, artificial, intensely grape smell that only exists in scratch-and-sniff stickers from the nineties — and something in my chest loosened.

Not completely. Not instantly. But enough.

The panic didn't disappear, but it shifted. My attention moved. My breath changed. And I sat there in math class holding a small grape-scented sticker, thinking: that was strange. What just happened?

I didn't have an answer. But I kept thinking about it.

Something in my chest loosened. Not completely. Not instantly. But enough.

Twenty Years of Figuring It Out

I went into massage therapy first. I wanted to understand the body — how it holds tension, how it releases it, what tools actually work when someone is suffering and you are trying to help them. I learned about the nervous system. About the parasympathetic response. About how touch and breath and environment could shift a person's physiological state in ways that no amount of willpower could.

And I kept coming back to scent. I started working with essential oils. I watched what happened when I incorporated them into treatment — how a diffuser in the room could change a client's session before I'd even touched them. How certain scents seemed to give people permission to let go.

I wanted to understand why.

Nursing school

I went back to school. Nursing. I wanted the clinical foundation — the neuroscience, the anatomy, the evidence-based understanding of what stress does to the human body over time. And I got it. I learned about the HPA axis and cortisol and the long-term consequences of a nervous system that never gets to rest.

I also watched, every single day, what happened to people who didn't have tools. Who didn't have a way to come down from the constant activation of modern life. Who had been running on stress for so long that they had lost the felt sense of what calm actually was.

I had been one of those people. I recognized them immediately.

Why the Adirondacks

Lake Placid in the the Adirondacks has always been where I could breathe. Literally — the air here is different. The smell of balsam and cold water and pine and the particular clean quality that comes from being surrounded by six million acres of protected wilderness. My nervous system has always known what to do with this place.

And I thought: what if I could give that to people who can't come here?

What if the scent of the Adirondacks — grounding, clean, specific, unlike anything synthetic — could be the cue that told someone's nervous system: you're safe. You can exhale. The world can wait for five minutes.

What if the scent of the Adirondacks could give someone's nervous system permission to exhale?

Building Pure Placid

I started making candles in small batches. Learning what worked. Obsessing over ingredients — because everything I knew from massage therapy and nursing told me that clean mattered, that what you breathe matters, that you cannot ask someone's body to relax while filling their air with petroleum byproducts and synthetic fragrance compounds.

Every Pure Placid candle is made with 100% soy wax, cotton wicks, and plant-based essential oils and botanical extracts. No paraffin. No synthetic fragrance. No phthalates. Not because those things are marketing words, but because I have spent twenty years thinking about what the body needs to feel safe, and I know that what you put in the air matters.

I started selling at local Farmers markets then opened a store on main street. Then it just snowballed.

What We're Really Making

When I started Pure Placid, I wasn’t trying to build a candle company. I was trying to solve a problem I knew intimately — how to feel steady in the middle of stress.

Anxiety has a way of hijacking the mind. It pulls you out of the present and into worst-case scenarios, to-do lists, and 3 a.m. spirals. I needed something simple. Something immediate. Something that didn’t require an hour of meditation or a perfect morning routine.

That’s when I began paying attention to scent.

Scent is the only sense that bypasses logic and goes straight to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory. Before you can overthink it, your body responds. One inhale can slow your breathing. Shift your mood. Bring you back into yourself.

So yes, we pour candles. We blend room sprays. We craft lotions and soaps.

But what we’re really creating are anchors.

Tools you can reach for when the day feels loud.
A cue for your body to soften.
A small ritual that tells your nervous system, you can exhale now.

Pure Placid was built on that belief — that calm isn’t something you chase. It’s something you practice. And sometimes, all it takes is a single breath to remember it’s already there.

That's what we're making. A reminder.