Julie Wray
Julie Wray caught the fragrance bug before most people understand what a perfume is. At eight years old, she was spending her allowance on soaps, lotions, and scented products, treating beauty products like currency. By eighteen, she had talked her way into a job at a perfume blending bar, where most newcomers learned the trade. She learned something else entirely: she was fired for creating her own formulas instead of following instructions. That early act of professional rebellion became the template for her entire career. She went on to open Aromatica, her own aromatherapy and perfume blending bar, before eventually founding the much-missed Olivine boutique in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood. The boutique became legendary among Pacific Northwest fragrance lovers before its closure. Wray has since relaunched her vision as Olivine Atelier, a platform for her clean, handcrafted scents. What drives her remains unchanged from childhood: a belief that scent is deeply personal, that what you wear should feel like an extension of who you are, not a mask or a trend.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Julie composes
Wray's work favors lush florals anchored by warm woods and skin-like musks. Her signature scent "More than the Stars" pairs stargazer lily and gardenia with almond, Egyptian musk, and sandalwood, a combination that feels both romantic and intimate. Her background in aromatherapy gives her formulations a certain coherence that many mass-market fragrances lack. She gravitates toward ingredients that feel lived-in rather than laboratory-designed, preferring florals with presence and musks that develop on skin rather than projecting loudly into a room. Clean beauty principles shape her ingredient selection without limiting her to any single aesthetic category.
Philosophy
What drives Julie
Wray builds her fragrances around a conviction that self-expression through scent leads to genuine happiness. She has spoken openly about learning that self-love is the foundation of real joy, and she applies that philosophy directly to her craft. Rather than chasing market trends, she creates fragrances she believes in and trusts that the right people will find them. Her clean fragrance approach means she rules out ingredients that don't meet her standards, regardless of conventional industry practice. She works from Seattle, and that Pacific Northwest sensibility inflects her work: thoughtful, unpretentious, grounded in nature without being precious about it.
The houses