What Actually Matters When Buying a Scented Candle

There is one candle in the office kitchen which has been lit twice in eight months. Both times it was lit by the same person. On both occasions someone opened a window within the hour. That pretty much sums up our experiences with scented candles in this building. We all own hundreds of them. Nearly nobody agrees on when it’s okay to light one.

We’ve purchased the overly large three wick jobs that smell amazing in the store and then manage to make your whole flat smell like what can only be described as a sex crime once you get home.

We’ve purchased tiny tins designed for travel that only burn for forty minutes and instantly smell, for some baffling reason, like you’ve wasted your money as soon as you put the lid back on.

Somewhere in between these two extremes is where most of us spend our candle-buying money, and even then there’s arguments to be had about what constitutes middle-grade because literally anything that one person likes will be “too big” or “too little” tea for someone else.

One thing nobody prepares you for when you start purchasing these distractions is how quickly the scent becomes the background/host infiltrates a very specific period of your life without asking.

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One of us cannot smell fig and blackcurrant without thinking of a January that was not good, okay, and has since stopped buying that scent. Not because the candle did anything wrong but because it was background/hosting our insomnia one week. That isn’t a problem you solve by purchasing another. That’s just what happens when you let a candle reside in your house for longer than a season.

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The throw is simultaneously the reason we all got into candles in the first place and the source of most arguments had here. You bring home a jar that fills your entire ground floor flat and someone inevitably gets upset that you didn’t ask if they wanted their nostrils fucked.

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A big throw is applauded until it’s 9pm on a Tuesday and your entire downstairs smells like a spa day you never consented to.

Small throw is insulted by people who then complain when someone else’s can fill the room.

There isn’t a middle ground on this because honestly at this point we haven’t tried to find one.

I think where we finally settle is on the idea that a candle should earn its keep by how well it performs during the dull parts of ownership. Does it burn down the centre or tunnel into nothingness leaving you with a useless perimeter of wax after three uses? Do you need to keep trimming the wick or will it just do its thing? We have a candle in this house that has survived two house moves and a breakup, never burning once because the owners couldn’t agree on when to light it. It just sat on a shelf for years, being a pleasant looking object and some of us hate it for that while others think it’s the entire point. What a waste that the scent got dumped inside.

All you need to do is buy the candle you’d actually light on a Tuesday. Not the one that looks coolest sitting on your shelf doing nothing. That’s the one rule that’s remained consistent through every debate we’ve had about candles.