Why we do not scent our candles

Somebody asks me this every week, and it is a fair question. Almost every candle sold in Europe is sold on its smell. Mine are not scented at all, and that looks like something missing rather than something chosen.

It is a choice, and there are four reasons for it. The first is the shortest.

Beeswax already smells of something. Faintly, warmly, of honey, because that is what it is. It is a quiet smell that you notice when you lean towards it and forget about from across the room. Adding a fragrance to it does not replace that smell, it puts a second smell on top of it, and the two of them argue. Honey and jasmine in the same object is not a fragrance. It is two fragrances in a small room.

The second reason is physical. Fragrance oil is an oil, and oil softens wax. A candle in a jar can carry a lot of it, because nothing in a jar has to hold a shape. A petal is a millimetre thick and stands unsupported on a stem, so the amount of fragrance I could add before the shape started to give would be too little to smell anyway. I would be spending money on an ingredient that does nothing except make the flower less able to be a flower.

The third reason is about other people's houses, and it is the one I actually care about.

Scent is a decision you make about the air somebody else has to breathe. In your own home that is entirely your business. As a gift, it is a guess, and the odds are worse than people think. Fragrance gives some people headaches. A good proportion of people are more sensitive to it than they say out loud, and a smaller number are much more sensitive than that. It is the first thing many people find intolerable in pregnancy. Households with cats and dogs think about it differently. And anybody who cooks seriously does not want a synthetic fig in the room while they are trying to taste a sauce.

A dining table is the clearest case. A strongly scented candle on a table where people are eating is competing with the food, and the food should win. It is one of the reasons a botanical candle that is looked at rather than smelled works so well as a centrepiece: it does the visual job without joining in.

The fourth reason is what these actually are. They are sculpted objects that happen to have a wick. Most of the ones I make are never lit, and I do not mind that at all. A botanical candle bought as an object is bought the way a small piece of pottery is bought, and nobody asks what a bowl smells of.

So that is the case for it. Here is the case against, because a page that only argues one side is an advertisement.

If what you want is for a room to smell of something, mine will not do it, and you should buy something else. There are people who take fragrance seriously and blend it properly, and a well-made scented candle from one of them is a genuinely good object. A reed diffuser will hold a room for months and does not need to be watched. If the smell is the point, buy the thing that is built for it, and do not buy a sculpted flower and feel let down.

There is a middle route that I like and that nobody sells, because there is no money in it. Burn an unscented candle for the light and put the smell somewhere else in the room. A bowl of citrus peel. Rosemary in water on a warm hob. A diffuser on the far side of the room. The two things stop competing, and you can change the smell without buying another candle.

People ask what unscented actually smells like, which is a better question than it sounds. Cold, close to nothing, with a trace of honey if you pick it up. Lit, a little more of the same, and it stays local: you notice it when you are near the flame, not from the doorway. It reads as warm rather than as a fragrance. If you have only ever burned scented candles, the first unscented one feels oddly plain for about ten minutes and then it feels like the room is quieter.

One practical note that belongs here. Because there is no fragrance oil to burn off, there is nothing to wait for. Some scented candles want a long first burn to open up. This is not that kind of object.

It is also worth saying that this is not a saving. Leaving the fragrance out does not make a candle cheaper to make, because the cost here is hours rather than ingredients. Nobody should read unscented as a version with something removed to hit a price.

The honest summary is that this is a narrower product than a scented candle, and narrow is fine. It is for the person who wants something on the table that looks like a flower, is made of one material, and does not take a position on what their living room should smell like. If that is you, the range is in the shop, the longer explanation of what these are is on the sculptural flower candles page, and the making of one is described in how a beeswax flower candle is made.

And if it is not you, I would genuinely rather you bought a scented candle you love from somebody else than an unscented one from me that sits there quietly disappointing you.