Our Product EcosystemI Body + Plant Medicine + Scent/Ritual

Southern Ritual • Botanical Care • Land & Remembrance

The Blacksence is a Black Southern cultural wellness practice rooted in land, plants, memory, and the ways we have always cared for one another.

We create small-batch candles, botanical body care, herbal oils, teas, and other offerings inspired by the everyday rituals Black folks have carried across generations—the plants steeped on the stove, oil worked into the scalp and skin, something simmering in the kitchen, a candle lit in remembrance, a seat offered on the porch.

Around here, we don't believe care begins with a product.

You are the altar.

What we make simply offers another way to tend it.

The Blacksence holds more than one meaning.

It carries Black scents—the aromas, plants, foods, homes, people, and places that stir memory before we have words for what we're remembering.

The Blacksence holds more than one meaning.

It carries Black scents—the aromas, plants, foods, homes, people, and places that can stir memory before we have words for what we're remembering.

And it carries sence, an archaic form of sense connected in our use to knowledge carried and passed through the matriarchal line—the kind of knowing inherited through mothers and grandmothers, through body and memory, story and practice, land and lived experience.

For The Blacksence, sence names the wisdom that isn't always written down. It is taught in what we do, what we make, what we tend, what we remember, and what one generation places into the hands of the next.

Together, The Blacksence speaks to both sensory memory and inherited knowing:

what we smell, what we sense, and what our mothers' mothers taught us to remember.

To create sensory offerings and experiences that nourish body and spirit while reconnecting us to Black Southern traditions of care, cultural memory, community, and land.

We don't make self-care for trends.

This ain't self-care. It's sacred care.

The Blacksence is growing home.

Our work is connected to Earth Medicine Farms, rooted in land my great-grandparents purchased in rural South Carolina in the 1950s and kept within our family across generations.

Today, we're returning to that land with intention—restoring soil, growing food and medicine, preserving agricultural knowledge, and creating space for another generation to experience Black land not only through histories of loss and labor, but through abundance, beauty, nourishment, and belonging.

As Earth Medicine Farms grows, so will the relationship between the land and what we make. We're working toward incorporating more farm-grown herbs and botanicals into Blacksence offerings and allowing the soil itself to become part of the story we send into people's homes.

Every purchase helps us continue that work.

Because reclamation isn't only about getting something back.

It's about remembering what it was always for.

I’m Akymia — a Black Southern woman, farmer, community strategist, maker, storyteller, and memory keeper.

The Blacksence grew from my own return: to land, to rest, to plants, to memory, and to the everyday ways Black Southern people have always cared for one another.

Much of what inspires this work isn't something I discovered. It's something I recognized.

It lives in memories of the women who came before me—in kitchens and gardens, remedies made from what was growing nearby, oil worked through hair and across skin, food prepared for people we loved, stories told and retold, and the knowledge that tending to one another was simply part of how we survived and how we lived.

My professional life has also been shaped by care.

For more than two decades, I've worked across education, nonprofit leadership, family support, program development, community engagement, and rural development—often in the spaces where institutions and communities are trying to understand one another better.

That experience taught me something I carry into everything I do:

People are not problems to be solved. They are knowledge holders, storytellers, strategists, and essential partners in shaping the places and systems that affect their lives.

Today, that philosophy informs both The Blacksence and my consulting practice, where I support organizations through organizational strategy, community engagement, and training grounded in lived experience, dignity, and community knowledge.

And increasingly, all of this work is bringing me back to the soil itself—to my family's land in rural South Carolina and the work of Earth Medicine Farms, where I am learning what it means to steward what previous generations worked to leave behind.

I create Blacksence offerings in that same spirit: candles poured by hand, herbs steeped slowly into oils, teas blended with intention, and scents chosen because sometimes the body remembers before the mind has words.

The Blacksence is my invitation to remember that care doesn't have to be earned, rest is not indulgence, our traditions hold knowledge worth carrying forward, and the places we come from can still teach us something about where we're going.

You are the altar.

The candle, the oil, the tea, the herbs?

They're simply offerings.