Noses are awesome! Our sense of smell can bring powerful emotions to the surface, and drag out long forgotten memories. I tend not to work with incenses and perfumed oils very often. I believe that scents used in magic, and in everyday life, should be subtle. You want to tease your olfactory organs, not choke them.
When I do employ specific scent blends, I prefer to work with essential and herb-infused oils rather than incense. I’ve really just never been a fan of scented smoke.
Had I been asked what my favourite scent was 5 – 10 years ago, I would probably have said “baking bread”, no contest. Irony hurts sometimes.
There are a lot of scents that invoke feelings of calm and nostalgia in me. The smell of wood smoke, whether from a stove or fireplace, reminds me of winters growing up. Almost everyone in my town had wood stoves, so that first scent of wood smoke hanging in the air always meant autumn to me.
Lilac and hyacinth are smells that scream spring after a long, cold winter. When the lilacs bloom in Calgary, our entire neighbourhood smells of spring perfume.
Coffee is another happy scent for me. It means warmth when coming in from the cold, good friends, and long, lazy conversations about dreams for the future.
There are other scents that I love (cooking turkey, baking cookies and pine trees), but I think that my favourite above everything else is the smell of rain. Not everyone will recognize it, but I can tell by the way the air smells when it will rain.
I can really only describe it as the scent of fresh moisture. For me, the smell of rain is the smell of home. It isn’t something that you think you’ll miss when it is always around, but I know better now. The fact that there are many less rainy days in Alberta makes me treasure the scent of rain all the more when it comes.
A Less Travelled Path 
I am a 2 year new* WI and would like your input— I am extremely olfactory * what I mean to say is that I encounter scents many times that no one around me can notice. Everything from perfume to smoke, food and rain of course -. A strange one that I get sometimes is like a faint chlorine or bleach type smell followed by actual burning in my nose! No… I am not that diligent with cleaning. So what do you think?
It could be that you just have a sensitive sense of smell. One thing you might want to do is go and get a check up at the doctors’ office, just to make sure that everything is alright. Sometimes when I start to get sick my sense of smell gets out of whack. Also, my sense of smell went into overdrive after I got pregnant with my little girl.