When my youngest twin girls started to grow up a little, I began looking for something that was just for me — a space beyond motherhood to rediscover who I was. As a mum of four, two boys and two girls — life was wonderfully full, but I realised I had stopped nurturing my own curiosity.
Fragrance had always been a quiet thread running through my life. It connected me to people and places, to comfort and to memory. Most of all, it connected me to my grandmother — a woman I sadly never met. She passed away before I was born, yet I always felt as though I knew her through her favourite perfume. I have vivid memories of playing with her jewellery that my mum kept and her fur stoles — a thing of their day — and spraying her perfume. That scent carried her presence.
My grandmother was an entrepreneur — a hotelier in Northern Ireland who broke glass ceilings for women in her time. I’ve always felt I carry her entrepreneurial spirit.
Finding my beginning in Grasse
For years I followed niche fragrance houses, seeking scents that felt intimate and rare. When I finally looked for something for myself, learning the art of perfumery felt natural and there was no better place to begin than Grasse, France, the hub of the fragrance world. That is where my journey truly began.
In Grasse, I worked and learned under a master perfumer in one of the oldest perfumeries in the world. It was there that I experienced something I could never have anticipated — the realisation that our sense of smell is intricately connected to memory, mood, and emotion.
When scent met memory
When I was twelve, I experienced trauma that silenced me for many years and pushed my life off course. Later, counselling was transformative — the root was removed and I healed, yet the childhood memories from before the trauma remained locked away. I accepted that they were lost, and I carried on positively, eventually training as a counselling practitioner to help young adults understand how unhealed trauma can manifest in destructive patterns.
Then, in Grasse, something remarkable happened. As I studied raw materials and blended at the organ, memories began to return. Science tells us that the olfactory system has a direct pathway to the brain’s centres for memory and emotion. Scent bypasses logic and language; it reaches the deepest places of who we are. I felt that truth in real time.
A single breath of a certain accord could take me back years — to safety, to belonging, to the people who loved me.
For years, I had been aware of a comforting aroma that would sometimes surround me — reassuring and familiar — yet I could never name it. I’d often thought, “If I could ever bottle this scent, I would.” In Grasse, I blind-smelled over two hundred notes and blended intuitively until that feeling came alive again. That composition became STORIES Nº.01 — a fragrance born of reassurance and rediscovery.
I wasn’t building a brand at that stage; I was following a personal path. I stayed on to learn more, and it was during the creation of STORIES Nº.02 that everything changed. The scent unlocked memories from before the trauma: afternoons in my grandfather’s garden with my father and grandfather, two loving men watching over me, pipes in hand, sunlight catching the smoke as it curled into the air.
In that moment, my story was rewritten. My childhood wasn’t lost; it was loving and held. Through scent, I had reconnected with the truth.
From a personal ritual to a perfumery
What began as a hobby became the foundation of a luxury niche fragrance house: STORIES Parfums. Each fragrance I create carries part of my story, but my hope is that it becomes part of yours — that through scent, you might reconnect with your own memories and moments that matter.
If you’re curious about why scent is so deeply tied to memory, I’ve written more about the olfactory pathway.
Seven years later, STORIES Parfums remains a celebration of craftsmanship and the profound link between fragrance and the human experience — a reminder that beauty and healing often begin in unexpected places.
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