The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Strawberries Crave Incense arrived in 2015 as part of the Arcana Craves sub-line, the indie house that built its entire catalog around a single naming conceit: a familiar object, a verb, a sensory destination. The Craves series took familiar subjects and paired them with atmospheric partners, and this one dropped sun-warmed berries into smoke. Strawberries Crave Incense was apparently discontinued, a limited perfume that never received wide restocking, and that scarcity is part of its current mythology. Finding a sealed bottle has become something of a quest, with the secondary market setting whatever terms it wants.
The genius here is the tension between the two registers. Woodland strawberry brings a green, almost underripe fruit quality, not the candy-sweet synthetic red berry that dominates so many mainstream compositions. Pairing it with frankincense and myrrh grounds the composition in old-world resin, the kind of smoke that carries centuries of ritual weight behind it. Then there's the musk architecture. Cashmere musk and red musk do the heavy structural lifting, giving the fruit and resin something to drape over.
The evolution
The opening announces itself within minutes, ripe and almost edible, but the smoke is already circling underneath. Frankincense and myrrh build fast, wrapping the strawberry in something resinous and warm. For the first stretch of wear, the fragrance reads almost like a fruit-and-amber composition, bright and grounding at once, the strawberry note front and center while the resins establish their presence beneath. The red berry character comes through clearly, not as a candy sweetness but as something closer to macerated fruit, the kind of note you'd associate with jam rather than fresh-picked berries, though the composition never tips fully into gourmand territory because the resins keep pulling it back toward something drier and more contemplative. As the fragrance develops, the musk begins to assert itself.
Cultural impact
Strawberries Crave Incense occupies a particular kind of space in the indie fragrance conversation, the space where discontinued limited releases end up once the original bottles are gone. It's the kind of fragrance that gets passed around in small decant circles, discussed in threads where people compare notes and lament missed releases, and occasionally surfaces in marketplace listings at prices that make newcomers do a double take.
