Defining Luxury In Scented Candles
What Is Luxury In Scented Candles?
In the world of modern functional fragrance, luxury scented candles have evolved from functional scent vehicles to becoming objects of desire and status symbols. I previously spoke about how a pair of sneakers can symbolize status in certain societies. This is part of consumerism, the excessive focus we as a society put on acquiring things to achieve satisfaction.
It may sound cynical, but status symbols have evolved from the biggest bone in the pack of hunters when we roamed the savannas to cars, clothes, jewelry, zip codes, baby strollers, dogs, cosmetics, perfumes, and, yes, even scented candles. It all goes back to why we shop, where we do it, and what we want to get out of it.
Follow along for a moment. Let's say we want to get a new lamp for our home. When we shop, we do so to fulfill a specific functional need, e.g., paper towels, aluminum foil, or a doormat. We also shop to meet a particular want, e.g., a new TV with more technology, a new set of pans for Thanksgiving cooking, or the new lamp I mentioned above.
We may have light fixtures around our house, such as ceiling flush mounts, table lamps, recessed lights in the ceiling, and so forth. But we don't have a floor lamp. So, out we go, looking for one that will provide light, fit into the decor where it will be placed, and look pretty. The question is, do we care enough about it that it should not only look pretty for ourselves, but also for others when they visit our home?
And this is where it starts, where we ponder all the reasons why we like one style over another, one brand or manufacturer over the others, the materials, the website or store where you found it, if it's new or vintage or antique, if it's trendy or classic, and so many other variables. To some, budget is essential, availability ( I "need" it now), and the look, design, and styling will be more critical to others. At some point in there, some will consider what others will think or say when they see the lamp.
Here's where the floor lamp, a functional need and a particular want, becomes a status symbol. Some may say, "I don't care about what others say, the lamp has to make me happy," and I'd agree. But beyond a price point and style, the lamp can and will become a symbol of status, especially if we take pride in the decor of our home. We fall into this trap almost unconsciously, if we are not purposely buying something to impress.
I think there is an aspect of status in luxury home fragrance, too. And I say this from the perspective of someone making luxury home fragrance. Why? Because if they did not matter as a symbol of status or taste, candles -scented or not- would not have been included in the product assortment of designer and luxury brands, and I would not have considered using luxury materials and components to make mine.
Part of the allure of a scented candle is its packaging, the labeling, the color of the vessel or the wax, the presentation, where it is sold, the websites where it is marketed, and its brand name. And all that, without considering the most relevant, functional assets: the fragrance and its diffusion performance. This is valid for scented candles across the price spectrum.
Yankee Candle
For many, Yankee Candle continues to be a symbol of performance and, if not taste, homemaking. Yankee Candle remains the largest manufacturer and seller of scented candles, at a whopping $818 million in 2022, according to this website. If you perform a search, you can go down that rabbit hole looking for different revenue numbers, but since I work in the industry, I know that they remain the leader in volume, distribution, and sales. And their candles perform quite well; let's be honest, that is why so many of us hate apple cinnamon and pumpkin candles.
Their product is functional and targeted at homemakers on a budget. It has no aspirational aspects, no projection of luxury, no pretense. It is a functional product that fulfills a need to add scent and ambiance without breaking the bank.
So, the question becomes, why do we buy candles at a higher price? Why do we buy from this or that brand, or this or that fragrance? Why do we put so much emphasis on products Made In France?
Part of it is perception, part of it is trend, and the most significant part is marketing. Yes, some luxury brands make beautiful candles. I used to buy them. However, over time, and as I entered the industry, I compared the performance of candles from multiple brands, and the results were average or mediocre. Most companies use a minimal fragrance load; their selling point is the vessel. Over the past decade, I could tell you the ones where the fragrance load has been getting lower and lower (almost yearly), which ones have slimmed down in their size or packaging, and I can tell you which brands I would continue buying if I didn't make my own.
I could also tell you the brands I would not be shopping from because I consider them a ripoff.
Defining Luxury In Candles
The definition of luxury is relative and variable. We all have a very personal take on it. In luxury home fragrances, I think it all boils down to personal taste. What I consider luxury today is not what I thought of a decade ago. If you go by what's currently showing up online, a parameter is the benchmark price point of $35.00 for a scented candle to be considered "high-end" or "prestige." Above that, the next tier is $70 to $100, considered "luxury brands."
For me, $35.00 is definitely not prestige. Not because of the price point, but because of what I've come to learn and expect of products at that price point. Some brands deliver exceptionally at that price point, while others, to me, are just junk. $70.00 is not "luxury" either, more like average to me. Why? Because the glass, paper label, box, wax type, and most importantly, the scent load and manufacturing process are at the same level of quality as a candle at $35.00. How do I know this? Because I make candles every day.
Again, this is my personal take on it, after years of testing candles from dozens upon dozens of brands and learning to make my own during those years. Let's remember that this is my blog on my website, and I can write in it my assessment not only from a personal experience perspective, but also from a manufacturer perspective, where I know where to source all the materials and components to make a candle at any price point.
Brand perception plays an important role. A name associated with a designer brand, or a storied design or perfume house, a new brand logo that looks like another prestigious brand, the visuals, where it's made, the fragrance styling, the website design, where it is sold at retail, and finally, the price point. The question is, what does luxury mean to you?
Do you buy because of the name? Do you consider whether this luxury candle will scent an entire room? Do you buy it because someone else had this luxury candle brand in their home or posted about it on social media? Do you like a particular fragrance a candle brand makes, or does one specific luxury home fragrance brand resonate with you more than another? Is there a brand your mom or aunt used to purchase? Do you buy a candle you'd consider a "luxury scented candle" impulsively because you liked the visuals and packaging?
What is the real purpose behind your purchase? If you go above $100 apiece, aren't candles a status symbol?
I asked myself all those questions during the early years of my product development. And over time, I concluded that a scented candle means different things at the same time, and has a particular meaning and function at different moments throughout the day. A luxury scented candle's most crucial aspect is the fragrance. Not only if it works, but if I like it, and if I consider it stylish, trendy, tasteful, elevated, sophisticated, even say, worthy of being burnt in my home—all superficial considerations except one: the quality of the fragrance in terms of diffusion, which is the clear functional purpose of a scented candle that I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post.
Signature Scents And Their Aromatic Profiles
Brands have become recognized by signature scents that have become best-sellers throughout the past decades. If you are a candle aficionado, you know them; I don't need to list them here. The same happens to my fragrance range; some have become instant best-sellers in the short span of two years that my website has been up and running. When this happens, the visuals and packaging of a candle continue to be important in terms of consistency in delivering. Still, the customer knows the product and has come to expect a result. Signature scents of best-selling candles are berries, tobacco, incense, oud, tomato leaves, jasmine, vanilla, fir balsam. The aromatic profiles remain within floral, gourmand, woodsy, amber/ oriental, and green/ balsamic. What defines a luxury product here is not so much the aromatic profile, but how it is associated to the brand, and how popular it is as an object of desire or that projects taste and style. A signature scent can be the foundation of an entire business.
Signature Packaging Of Luxury Scented Candles
When you don't know the brand, the visuals and packaging become more relevant because you have not tested their fragrances. This is where the perception of luxury is relevant when picking one brand over another. Over time, if you are an aficionado, you can recognize packaging that has more care and attention to detail, and this also plays a role in your identifying it as "luxury." To me, the packaging of my candles and all other products I sell is essential. Why? Because it's what you see first when you open a box I shipped to you. I created boxes you would feel compelled to keep, perhaps to give them another use. If not to keep them, I want the first moment of unwrapping one of my candles to be a few seconds of memorable. Here is where my personal definition of luxury matters. And I think several other brands do a great job, while some are just average.
A particular luxurious type of packaging for my candles has become average to me; a better word may be standard. I won't go below a certain standard of cardstock thickness, paper quality, print quality, and overall heftiness of a box. My average may be too much for other brands; they may be unable to fit it into their price point. These particular choices keep elevating the product or keeping it, well, average.
Craftsmanship of High-End Candles
The craftsmanship involved in producing luxury scented candles is significant. Even if you don't make your own fragrances but own a luxury home fragrance brand, the make of the candles is important. Some brands are completely mechanized because their output is so large (think global) that they cannot afford to have many employees pouring them by hand. The wax is melted and mixed with fragrance oils in giant vats as tall as a two-story home. Other brands are partially mechanized, where machines pour automatically into the vessels, and the wicks are controlled manually, and other brands can still afford to make most of their production by hand, in small batches.
This is where I fit. I make everything by hand and in small batches. I make only what I sell. Therefore, my product is scarce, and either customized, bespoke, or with limited availability. I don't keep an extensive stock because I don't believe it is sustainable. I prefer to pour by the dozen, and I pour by myself or supervise an assistant. So, I control all the aspects of the process. More importantly, I pick all the components and materials for production.
Above all, I make my own fragrances. When I realized there were many areas I would not have visibility into if I relied on a third-party compounder, it did not matter if they were a big oil company with an internationally recognized name or a regional fragrance compounder. What mattered to me was the visibility and traceability of all the materials used to make my fragrances.
For me, the very definition of luxury is complex but relative, meaning different things at the same time: it is scarcity, something beautiful, something that will add to my home or my life in general, a piece that I may keep for a long time or forever, an object that is well made, well packaged, and well presented. In some aspects, it is an extension of who I am, an extension or representation of what I like, what I enjoy.
To Make Luxury, One Must Use Luxurious Components
To create luxury, I implement all these aspects of what I consider luxury. That is why I use crystal vessels, gold-plated accessories, coated papers that are waterproof, and all of it housing fragrances that I created, using all the materials that a compounder would never include in a fragrance blend. To complement this, I use rare marbles, semiprecious stones, and onyx to create accessories that expand on the offerings on my website. All these aspects make my product luxurious. Not because they are perceived as such, but because they are the very essence of luxurious materials and components by themselves, and ultimately, materials and components that none of the other luxury home fragrance brands use.
Performance: Why It Matters
I could not market products at a luxury price point and in a luxury market if I did not stand behind them in terms of performance.
Going back to the functional aspect of a scented candle, to me, it has to perform the function of diffusing its fragrance throughout the product's entire life cycle. And, it has to perform to the extent that I can smell it when I walk into the room, or smell it throughout the entire floor and more than one room at home, or even better, be carried upstairs following the simple principle that hotter air will always go up. This means that my candles are, by definition, strong. Their visuals, packaging, and presentation are important, but the fragrance style, complexity, and how it diffuses are equally important.
I don't believe in selling something that looks fancy but doesn't perform its basic function: providing a fragrance. Many other brands already do that.
When faced with many brands I considered as benchmarks and competition, I had to make choices. Did I want to be "one more candle brand" (as I was once told), or would I want to stand out? What would make consumers look at my products when they already have their favorite brands and follow the trends in terms of best-selling fragrances? What would make my candles and other products stand out in a sea of what I considered average, or diminishing in value over time?
From my perspective, I saw a saturation of average packaging, low fragrance performance, and more marketing than substance.
My husband said, "You must create products that stand out and offer more than other brands. Offer better quality; otherwise, how do you convince people to try your candles?" His point of view made sense. Why bother making more of the same average glass jars with paper stickers and inexpensive boxes? Dissecting the packaging of these benchmark brands, I learned a lot about where and how they cut corners, and I did not want to make the same mistake. Not if I would create something that would carry my name.
I also did not want to fall into the trap of using the same functional fragrance used by most brands, compounded by someone else. While interfacing with some compounders, some even sent fragrances they produced for these benchmark brands as samples, "This is what we make for so and so, this is their so and so fragrance." I mean...Come on.
While investigating and asking questions, I learned that functional fragrance inside a fragrance company is designed by the same teams that design fragrances for dish detergents, soaps, gels, and floor cleaners. That is why there is a common thread behind their functionality. And that is why one candle's incense or balsam fragrance is terribly similar to its competitors' and sometimes smells like Mrs. Meyers detergent.
If you think the fragrance of candles is compounded by master perfumers creating for designer houses and niche perfume brands, think again. These perfumers are not affordable for candle brands; the contracts for designer and niche perfumes are worth millions of dollars. Chandler Burr talks about this in his The Emperor Of Scent book about Luca Turin.
How Candle Brands Make The Fragrance In Their Candles
If you want to launch a candle brand, luxury, or whatever other price point, you have three basic routes to tackle the fragrance problem:
- Hire a compounder, buy the fragrance from a third party.
- Use fragrance oils readily available in the market, using them as they come, mixing them, mixing them with essential oils (if you dare) and diluents, etc. Fragrance oils are the most inexpensive route and many websites sell them.
- Be or become a perfumer to create your own fragrances.
When a candle brand doesn't specify who makes its fragrance and instead says, "A team of talented perfumers creates our fragrances," it's because it has handed this part to a compounder. The brand owner/s or managers don't know the perfumers' names behind the formulas they buy from this third party. Or if they know, they don't want you to know that this most essential part of the product is handled by someone else. Either way, they don't know what went into the fragrance formulas.
If they say they use "luxurious fragrance oils," there is no such thing as a "luxury fragrance oil" if the price is 3 cents per gram. Fragrance oils are commodities, mass-produced compounds, readily available online from many companies; all it takes is calculating their prices per kg or lb to see their price per gram. Let's just remember that this is my assessment from investigating the industry before deciding how to produce my candles. I am not judging brands, owners, or anyone else selling candles out there, or "airing grievances" about the market (I was also told that). How other brands choose to make their products doesn't matter to me. It matters how I decide to make mine.
If a brand doesn't use readily made fragrance oils purchased online, the other route is to use compounders, and only so many compounders cater to the industry. There are only so many ways of getting compounded fragrance by the lb or pallet. These companies offer different versions of floral, woodsy, amber, vanilla, balsam, grapefruit, and what have you formulas, all very similar in genre. They have teams that do nothing but create new iterations of the same best-selling aromatic profiles daily. Why? Because they are best-sellers. My sampling of products from other brands also revealed that the average fragrance load is relatively low, at between 3% and 6%. The scent load is average around those percentages, whether they are considered high-end, prestige, or luxury. Not so luxurious, after all. It's no wonder their candles don't diffuse as expected.
How do I know? I sampled and tested products over and over. That's when it dawned on me that I had to learn perfumery and make my own blends if I wanted my candles to stand out and be different in the market. And I definitely wanted my candles to have a strong scent diffusion and offer the highest level of fragrance luxury one could afford. So I opted for an average 10% to 12% fragrance load in my candles. By the way, 12% is the highest fragrance load any wax will hold before it "sweats." This "sweat" condenses in tiny bubbles on the candle's surface when it's not burning. It's not a mark of bad quality; it just means it has too much fragrance, and the fragrance condenses when it evaporates. You'd be lucky today to find a candle with this problem!
The road less traveled, point 3 above, is to learn chemistry and perfumery to make your own fragrances, which I chose to do.
There is a connection between luxury and performance. As a product developer, I have learned the inside of this business to the extent that I did not want to follow the same formulaic process as other brands. I wanted to offer both luxurious looks, materials, and performance that matched.
I wanted to change the paradigm of inexpensive fragrance quality and content, and that required learning chemistry, biochemistry, botany, and the development of scented vehicles.
Personally, I cannot dictate what others consider luxury; it's up for debate. But I chose to offer luxury and performance as I learned to define them for myself, and in the process, I learned and continue to learn about perfumery far more than I ever thought I would.
I also discovered that fragrance was a latent passion I always had, parallel to product development. I feel privileged to work in this field and have a successful business creating and sharing beauty.
RHR
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