Scented candles? The real risk is from over-whiffy women
OH DEAR. I think I’m partly to blame for the latest national health hazard. According to research carried out by San Diego University, the ubiquitous scented candle that flickers in even the most modest of households has had a damaging effect on the quality of the air, driving up the risk of health problems, especially among children. It’s almost as dangerous as secondary smoking, apparently.
It was bad enough when a former friend and colleague blamed me for the fact her Georgian house, which had just been renovated, burnt to a crisp because of an unattended Jo Malone Lime, Basil and Mandarin candle. (Her two cats only survived by squeezing behind the fascia of the bath; one of them still coughs.) But the health of the nation’s children? My God, and I’d thought I was only advocating that women literally burn their wages!
It all began exactly 20 years ago, when I had to visit the Plaza Athénée in Paris for work. I couldn’t believe that even the air inside this lovely hotel smelled different, other-worldly.
I asked the concierge how they did it, and he wrote down one word, Ambre, which to this day is the signature scent of the hotel, and drew me a little map, to the Parfumeur Parisien depuis 1961: Diptyque, a shop where a large red Tubéreuse tub of wax costs £190. And that was it!
Other people collect husbands, children, paintings. I collected candles, wherever my travels took me. A visit to Yves Saint Laurent’s garden in Marrakech? A Jardin Majorelle candle now has pride of place on my desk. A week in St Tropez to interview Brigitte Bardot? I visited Les Senteurs Tropéziennes, the sort of place that has candles under glass cloches, and makes you sniff the air, like a bloodhound: I still have an unlit, £65, triple-wick candle No4, which smells exactly like the long-shut interior of an ancient church in Puglia.
I wrote, extensively and floridly, for two decades about my love of candles. I namechecked them, as though they were famous lovers. And now I find, as though I’m a teenage boy spraying Febreeze on his trainers, that I might as well have been smoking common or garden Drum roll-ups all over my pets. Sacré bleu!
The solution, I suppose, is to buy these candles as objets, and never to light them: far safer, and the scent is much more subtle. I don’t think they go off. They can’t do much harm, surely?
Or has the time come to admit that we’ve hit peak parfum; that we should clear the air from the clouds of competing scents that waft from a million reed dispensers, plug-in air fresheners and scented candles across the land? A plague on the perfume pollution!
ACTUALLY, I’m of the firm belief that women who wear too much scent are a far worse assault on the nation’s health than a flickering floral wick. I once had to sit through Titanic next to a woman wearing the very old-lady-smelling My Burberry Limited Edition: if I even get a waft today, I go a bit green around the gills.
Women have been brainwashed into believing that, by buying a perfume by Marc Jacobs or Prada at Gatwick, they are suddenly welcomed into the fashion elite. They’re not. You will just persuade those around that you are an alcoholic, covering up the smell of gin. And the inappropriateness of wearing a killer fragrance – Opium, say – to a formal event such as a wedding or the opera is like showing up with your skirt caught in your knickers.
At a funeral in Loughton in Essex a few years ago, I lost track of the number of young women asking me to sniff their necks: Jade Goody’s Shush, apparently. If you simply must wear a scent, avoid all those over-made-up women in department stores who try to Taser you as you head to the food hall. Instead try two scents, one on each wrist, on any given day (any more, and your nose will become confused), then live with the smells for a few hours before making up your mind: the chemistry changes as it reacts to body heat.
Or why not try the only one that works on me for downtime: Mitsouko, which is subtle, clean and romantic but also manages to cover up any undertones of dog, cat and horse. At work, to avoid being passed over yet again by all the white men in suits, try a chypre, a fancy term for a mossy wood, a sonata of bergamot, labdanum and oakmoss first dreamed up by the greatest perfumer of all, François Coty. The best example is Chanel’s Pour Monsieur.
Be warned, though, as Luca Turin writes in the wonderful Perfumes: The A To Z Guide: ‘I have on occasion cautioned men to avoid wearing a fragrance that’s seen more of the world than they have.’