An Optical and Olfactory Banquet // Curiosities for the Senses
One bright morning in the middle of the night…
I have been obsessed with scent for as long as I can remember.
When I was nine or ten, I got a toy perfume-making kit with a few scent mixers and little plastic bottles to label when I finished my blends. Some of the scents were extremely weird. I loved them. I mixed everything, bottled my creations, named them, labeled them, and generally lost my ever-loving mind over the fact that I could make my own perfume.
My sister-in-law hated them.
Apparently, I have always been like this.
Many years and several questionable fragrance experiments later, Hazel Fern Scents began with candles, wax melts, and soap made for family and friends. This was more than twenty years ago now, which is rude and I don’t care to discuss it further.
I wanted to make things that smelled good, obviously. But even then, I think I was reaching for something else. I just didn’t have words for it yet. I was fascinated by the way scent holds onto people and places, and how one tiny whiff can bring back a room, a person, a specific Christmas, or some random Tuesday in 1984 that you didn’t even know your brain had saved.
One of my earliest fragrances was called *Helen’s Kitchen*.
I know what you’re thinking. It sounds like a candle you’d buy at a craft show between a hand-painted wooden sign and a woman selling soup mix in a bag.
You are not wrong.
But it is also something much deeper and, dare I say, darker.
Helen was my grandmother. She died long before I was born. The fragrance was inspired by my aunt’s stories about her apple pies. Spiced apples, pastry, cream. A kitchen reconstructed through someone else’s memory.
I was trying to capture the presence of a woman I had never met and never would.
I don’t think I understood that at the time. I just knew I wanted to make something that smelled like the stories. Something that could take family memories and sensory fragments and turn them into a real thing you could hold in your hand.
At the time, I thought I was just making candles.
Looking back, I think I was already trying to make ghosts.
That impulse still runs through nearly everything I create.
Scent is my strongest memory trigger. A trace of perfume in a room, cold air against warm skin, old wood, incense smoke, a particular kind of soap. Any of it can split time open without warning.
My fragrance December came from childhood Christmases spent lying beneath the tree, breathing in the scent of my mother’s vintage sachet ornaments. I can still smell them in my head.
Other creations begin with old photographs, family stories, folklore, historical rabbit holes, half-remembered rooms, vanished places, dead relatives, beautiful objects, private jokes, grief, desire, or just some feeling that refuses to leave me alone until I figure out what it smells like.
In 2011, I purchased a shop at the Michigan Renaissance Festival, and Hazel Fern grew into a much larger world of candles, wax melts, incense, hand-blended perfume oils, lip balms, and other fragrant curiosities.
But scent is only one part of what I do, and honestly, I have never been particularly good at staying in one lane.
I’m a visual artist with a BFA in Studio Art, an illustrator, and a licensed Advanced Esthetician. I’m also a family historian and collector of old stories and strange details. I can spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about skin, faces, beauty, aging, memory, ancestry, folklore, magic, ritual, touch, and the things people leave behind.
I like old photographs, old houses, fairy tales before they were cleaned up for children, family stories that change depending on who is telling them, and beautiful things with something a little strange underneath.
My personal aesthetic is probably best described as Feral Snow White. If Snow White wandered out of the forest, got a BFA, became an esthetician, somehow acquired a Victorian curiosity cabinet, got obsessed with dead relatives and old photographs, and started making things that smell like memory, that would be pretty close.
I am endlessly curious about people. The faces they present to the world. The things they hide. The things they inherit without realizing it. The way memory changes shape. Why some things disappear and others refuse to stay buried.
I also like pretty things and dirty jokes, so please don’t get the wrong idea.
All of those threads end up here somehow.
Hazel Fern Scents lives somewhere between the dressing table and the forest, the family album and the locked drawer, the kitchen and the séance room. It is part feral romanticism, part domestic haunting, part historical curiosity, part sensory memory, with enough humor to keep the whole thing from disappearing up its own velvet-draped ass.
I make beautiful things that smell like memory.
Sometimes that memory is yours.
Sometimes it belonged to someone else first.
And sometimes you have no idea why it feels familiar.
Thank you for visiting my world.
Johna
