Seasonal scents pass sniff test

Jameson: Candles, essential oils and more to fill your home.

COMMENTARY sniff out the winners and stinkers to find the perfect seasonal scent. There is nothing I won’t do for you.

I imagine this is what a French bordello smells like, though I wouldn’t know, a row of rooms engulfing wafts of foreign perfumes. Only instead of perfume, my rooms capture aromas of pinecones, cinnamon, fir trees and gingerbread.

We sniff, and keep our opinions to ourselves. As I said, highly scientific.

I limit my non-exhaustive study to three fragrance vehicles — candles (two samples), essential oils (two samples) and scent sticks (four samples), because a nose can only take so much.

Here is our analysis.

Many companies make wonderful, holiday-scented candles, but some are just awful, like migraines with a wick. Regardless, candles go with Christmas like reindeer go with sleighs. For the study, I used candles from Thymes. We test-smelled the company’s best-selling Frasier Fir candle (will someone please tell these people the tree is spelled Fraser Fir), and the Gingerbread candle.

Holiday candles add a magical ambience, but you can’t leave them unattended. I once had an entire faux-pine centerpiece go up in flames when the center candle burned low.

Frasier fir beat out Gingerbread, but only slightly. Both smell fabulous. The clean, green fragrance of the Frasier Fir means you can live with it longer; the gingerbread scent gets points for not smelling heavy.

Although 82 percent of Christmas trees in U.S. households are artificial, according to the American Christmas Tree Association, folks still pine for that fresh-tree smell. Balsam Hill, a company better known for its high-end, artificial Christmas trees, answers that longing with a line of natural essential oils extracted from real trees in the Northeast.

You can diffuse the oils with reeds, other diffusers or through the company’s Scents of the Season Fragrance Machine, which is what I did. About the size of a small coffee thermos, the machine runs on rechargeable batteries, or you can plug it in.

You won’t get that warm candle glow, but you won’t burn the house down. The device lets you control the fragrance output — from barely there to there go your eyebrows — as well as how long it runs. The small drawback is the price. The machine is $99, and a set of three, halfounce bottles of essential oils costs $29. We test-smelled Balsam