Am I addicted to scented candles?
Here’s how bad it’s gotten: I ordered a scented-candle-making kit.
I know, I know; I am way behind the curve, to which the wickless, fragrance- free, picked- over shelves of my local Michaels can attest. ( Not much I can do with a five- pound bag of soy wax without wicks, is there, Michaels?) So I was forced to turn once again to Amazon, thereby draining any potential “pioneer” spirit from the enterprise. ( It’s hard to think of yourself as “getting back to basics” while ordering something online.)
In this case, however, DIY pride is not a factor. I actually know how to make candles and churn butter and sew ( if graded on a generous curve) a fine seam, because I am old enough to have had several years’ worth of home ec as well as wood and metal shop, thrust upon me by the beneficence of the Maryland State Department of Education.
Nor am I attempting to distract my family with yet another pandemic project. My new hobby is simply a matter of economics: I will be trying to make my own scented candles because I need to stop spending so much damn money on scented candles and I refuse to accomplish this by burning fewer of them.
Before the pandemic, I had an uneasy relationship
with the turn- of- the- century boom in the home fragrance industry.
Certainly it is lovely to walk into a fig- or balsam- or hyacinth- scented room ( apologies to those who are allergic or bothered by scent). But all those candles and diffusers cost money, often quite a bit, and their growing popularity seemed to be a tell of the new fauxcozy consumerism, a mark of a system that encouraged the notion that money was there to burn. In Los Angeles anyway, the fault lines of gentrification always seemed to lead to a coffee bar and a shop selling $ 40 candles, often with names like Cashmere.
The furor over Meghan Markle’s penchant for Dyptique, revealed during a remote appearance on “America’s Got Talent,” was solid evidence in support of my long- held belief that scented candles were part of the luxury economy, appropriate for holidays, giftgiving and the side tables of the very rich.
So does crisis make moral cowards of us all. I started burning candles at the beginning of the shutdown in order to make the house seem more festive. March was cold, if you remember, and often overcast — even rainy — and my newly recongregated family needed a lift that did not involve consuming 2,000 extra calories per day in baked goods. And it was just for a month or two, right?
Nine months later, scented candles are now a staple; I buy them with the same regularity I buy milk, turkey burgers and toilet paper. There are used candle jars stashed in every cupboard like the empty bottles of a secret drunk and ashtrays not seen in decades are scattered throughout the house as receptacles for all those burned matches.
The love has spread
And I’m not the only one. My older daughter’s bedroom is has been awash in apple cinnamon scent for months in an attempt to keep pace with her Temple University education seasonally as well as academically. She has learned how to trim a wick and uses terms like “a good throw” ( referring to the ability of a candle to spread scent).
Whatever prejudice I had against unlikely formulations and absurd names is long gone. Home Sweet Home, Sweater Weather, Autumn Oak and Charred Juniper blaze away in every room and, yes, my younger daughter was one of those who caused Target to sell out of its Cashmere Vanilla candle after someone on TikTok mentioned it smelled like the Tom Ford scent favored by Harry Styles.
“When you come home with one that says ‘ Live, Laugh, Love,’ ” my son said, “I am going to have to stage an intervention.”
Honestly, if Yankee Candle, Bath & Body Works or Target had any sense of honor, they would name a fragrance after me. Although I’m not sure “earthy anxiety combined with salty hints of sorrow and spicy top notes of fury and fear” would be a bestseller.
Especially since the whole point of all these candles is to create an alternate me, one who lives serenely, in a calmer, saner, more hopeful place and time. A time when how my home smells doesn’t matter so much because I am not in it 24/ 7.
As I informed my smartmouthed son, science has proven that smell is the strongest trigger of memory and emotion — the olfactory bulb runs straight from the nose to the amygdala and hippocampus, parts of the brain most strongly associated with emotion and memory. ( Hippocampus Nights — a woodsy fragrance, with a strong patchouli body and a top of balsam and eucalyptus.)
And frankly, triggering all the best memories and emotions has become paramount these days. We need to remember a time when we weren’t all stuck at home, our stomachs in permanent churn over pandemic anxieties. So it really isn’t surprising that while much of the beauty industry is in free- fall — who needs lip liner when there’s no place to go? — home fragrance has grown in leaps and bounds. As Americans shelter at home, we increasingly seek solace in light and scent; candle- making has saved more than a few small businesses.
Candles for 2020
Faced with financial struggles early in the pandemic, Fresno’s Smoke & Fire came up with a quarantine line of scents including Shelter & Chill, Come Thru Queen and even Our Votes Matter (“infused with Fir, Cypress, Bayberry, a hint of Vanilla, and Eucalyptus”) alongside more traditional varietals including Fireside Chat and, of course, Cashmere Sweater.
In our house, the blossoms of spring gave way first to the citrus of summer before mellowing into the apple and amber of autumn and now we have moved firmly into the balsam and spice of the holidays. The scents emanating from cheerful little flames not only reassure us that we don’t have COVID- 19 ( everyone who has never woken feeling a bit crappy and rushed to test their sense of smell, please stand on their head) but also remind us that there are things, many important things, that exist implacably and restoratively beyond the reach of current events.
Yes, it may still be warm enough to wear shorts here in Southern California, but it is winter somewhere. The pandemic cannot forbid the dropping of leaves, the emergence of naked trees; it cannot banish those bright sunny days that dissolve into gold, then amethyst, then starry shivery black.
COVID- 19 will certainly curtail this year’s experience of Christmas but as the Whos down in Whoville learned all those years ago, Christmas cannot be quenched. As the days grow shorter, our experience of the upcoming holidays will be different, but they can still be festive, still be happy.
Aff inity runs deep
It’s a lot to ask of a few tumblers of scented wax, but then I was raised Catholic and everyone knows about Catholics and their deep attachment to candles, offered up, with prayers, in memory of the dead and hope for the living.
The aromas that scent so many homes these days form their own kind of continuous prayer: that someday soon, we will not need the therapeutic power of ylang ylang and lavender, apple and clove to soothe nerves frazzled by confinement, worry and the perpetual aggravation of a news cycle that has done its utmost to make Dorothy Parker’s phrase “What fresh hell is this?” mundane.
After all, it is better to light a single candle than sit and curse the darkness — and if the darkness fights back, then a little sparkling cinnamon spice should do the trick.