I was standing at the front of math class, waiting for my turn.
My palms were sweaty. My heart was racing. I was the kind of kid who knew anxiety well — the kind who could feel a spiral starting before it even had a reason to. And in that moment, standing there in front of everyone, I was about to lose it.
I reached for my Trapper Keeper and started nervously scratching the stickers on the cover. I don't even know why. It was just something to do with my hands.
Then I took a breath.
The smell of grape hit me — and in an instant, I wasn't in math class anymore.
| "For that split second, my mind stopped worrying. The spiraling ended. I was skating." |
I was at the skating rink.
The rink was just across the street from school — the same ice where the 1980 Olympics had happened, which made it feel like hallowed ground to a kid growing up in Lake Placid. I loved that place. I wasn't a great figure skater, but I didn't care. What I loved was the warmup — skating as fast as I could, music blasting, friends flying around the ice. That feeling of speed and freedom. Nothing chasing you. Nothing waiting. Just the cold air and the sound of blades.
And the grape soda. I was never allowed soda at home, so having one at the rink was always a small, perfect treat. The kind of thing that makes a place feel like yours.
The grape scent from that sticker took me straight back to all of it. The music. The cold. The freedom. The soda in my hand. For one split second, I wasn't a nervous kid waiting to be called on. I was skating.
The spiraling stopped. I pulled myself together, did the math problem, and sat back down.
I never told anyone what had just happened. I just tucked it away. Filed it somewhere quiet in the back of my mind as something I didn't quite have words for yet: that scent had reached into my brain and changed something.
| "It wasn't an expensive essential oil. It wasn't a curated ritual. It was a 25-cent scratch-and-sniff sticker. And it worked." |
That was my first conscious memory of seeing a direct link between scent and my nervous system. But looking back, scent had always been working on me that way — I just hadn't noticed.
Growing up in the Adirondacks, I was surrounded by it. I was the kid who'd tell her mom in winter: "The trees are all dressed up in the snow, but they've lost their perfume." I would stop on every hike to smell the leaves. At the Whiteface Club in the summers, there were cedar bushes near the pool — I'd crush the leaves and rub them on my wrists like perfume. I was always chasing something I couldn't fully name.
After that math class moment, I started paying closer attention. I didn't dive into textbooks right away. It wasn't like that. It was more like a quiet thread I started following — noticing when a scent shifted something in me, wondering why, storing it away. The curiosity came first. The studying came later.
Years later, in college and massage school in New Mexico, that curiosity finally found its education. I attended a series of lectures by Horst Rechelbacher — the founder of Aveda and one of the pioneers of natural cosmetics — at the University of New Mexico. I went to every single one. Through massage school and my growing obsession with scent, I was also able to attend lectures by Dr. Gary Young, the founder of Young Living, and visit his farm. For the first time, I had language for what I'd been experiencing since that math class: scent works directly on the limbic system, the part of the brain that governs emotion and memory. It bypasses the rational mind entirely. It works faster than thought.
That 25-cent sticker had done in one second what no amount of telling myself to calm down had ever done.
I came back to Lake Placid and spent fifteen years as a massage therapist and spa owner. I incorporated essential oils into every treatment. I made products and gave them to clients — lotions, sprays, things I mixed by hand. People started asking if they could buy them. That quiet thread I'd been following since math class was pulling me somewhere specific.
Then nursing school. In chemistry class, we learned saponification — the science of how oils transform into soap and skincare — and something clicked. It reminded me of everything I'd learned from Horst about natural cosmetics. I went home and started playing in my kitchen. Made things. Gave them away. People asked for more.
Pure Placid was already started. I just hadn't named it yet.
| "Every candle we pour, every lotion we make — it all traces back to a nervous kid with a Trapper Keeper, and the moment scent showed her what it could do." |
I think about that moment in math class sometimes. How small it was. How private. How I just tucked it away without telling a soul.
And how everything — all of it — came from that one breath.
The brain doesn't care whether a scent comes from a $200 essential oil blend or a sticker from a middle school Trapper Keeper. The limbic pathway is the limbic pathway. The mechanism is the mechanism. Scent gets there faster than anything else — faster than thought, faster than intention, faster than a breathing exercise.
That's why Pure Placid exists. Not to sell candles. To give you a tool that works the way your brain actually works.
I've been fascinated by that ever since a grape-scented sticker sent me to a skating rink for one perfect, spiraling-free second.
I hope our scents do that for you too.
With love from Lake Placid,
Marcy
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