Smoke & Memory: My Story

It was only seven years ago that I found myself flooded with cortisol — restless, exhausted, and quietly falling apart inside my own skin.

I was working in humanitarian settings and away from what I would call home — moving through displacement camps, disaster zones, and moments of unimaginable loss. The kind of places that change you quietly, from the inside out. Over time, that energy began to live inside me. My nervous system forgot calm. My body forgot how to feel safe. My skin dulled. I felt far away from myself.

I stopped trusting people. I stopped trusting myself — my judgement, my instincts. I forgot how to like myself. There was guilt in leaving those places behind, and guilt in knowing that the horrible things continued even after I left. That feeling doesn’t really go away — it just reshapes itself over time.

During those years, I was also lucky enough to be welcomed into communities whose rituals held so much wisdom. I saw herbs and resins being burned for healing — smoke rising like prayer. The scent carried something I couldn’t explain, something between grief, grace, deep connection and a shared experience within communities. That stayed with me.

When I finally stopped, I started searching for that feeling again. I began burning herbs, peat, resins — not with any goal, just instinct. The scent of smoke, of earth and fire, became a way to enter a quiet, meditative state — a space where old memories began to surface gently.

Through that stillness, I found fragments of home again: my grandad, the house I grew up in. The round table where the Easter bunny came every year. The parkour flooring I’d slide across. The faint, stale scent drifting in from the garage. The untouched rooms, the beds no one slept in. The white flower that crept around the doorway into the dining room. And the fires — sitting around them with him at Christmas in the cottage we grew up in, or by pub fires over the winter. That kind of warmth that makes the world feel right again.

Menteath started there. Not as a business idea — more like a way back to myself. I began blending skincare that felt like ritual. Smoke-infused, elemental, grounding. Something that connected what I’d seen in the world with what I was learning to feel again.

Smoke became my teacher. Its ancient, cleansing, transformative power — a bridge between body and spirit.

Every Menteath product carries that story: of burning away what’s heavy and finding your way back home.

- Felicity