Empties: Candle Edition

I’ve always wanted to be a candle person: you know, the kind who always has a flame flickering in a pretty jar on her kitchen counter and whose home smells recognizably welcoming.

But it turns out I don’t actually like most candle scents (in my own house, at least). I’ve tried! I’m often given aesthetic candles for presents and I always burn them down, but it usually takes months because I just don’t enjoy them enough for lighting them to become a reflex. Jon is even harder to please when it comes to scents in the home, so I don’t buy many candles because I know they probably won’t be to his liking.

And then Father Christmas (via my mother-in-law) stuck a candle from Snape Maltings called Captain’s Wood into my stocking last winter and we both loved it! I was so thrilled to finally find a scent that we both liked that I went on the website to order more, something I’d never done before with a candle; when I didn’t see it available online, I actually called the store. The manager said they no longer carried the line but offered to look in the back to see if they had any stock left and, lo and behold, they did! I ordered five more - at £17.75 each, I couldn’t justify more - and my MIL picked them up the next weekend. She has promised to bring one over at each of her future visits, helping me ration them out.

I’m not well-versed enough in fragrances to know what smells I was picking up from Captain’s Wood and the label didn’t give any hints, so I didn’t think I’d be able to find anything similar while I was waiting. Happily, though, I found a winner as I was browsing Bath and Body Works the other week: White T-Shirt. I bought one on sale and, joy of joys, Jon approved of the scent! Two candle successes in succession? Unheard of! So, when I saw that White T-Shirt was even further discounted (because, I learned, they were clearing out stock and discontinuing a bunch of candles), I bought five more.

White T-Shirt describes itself as “your favorite, freshly washed tee, hung to dry in a sunny meadow” with notes of crisp pear, lavender cloud and soft cedarwood. It’s a laundry-type of fragrance but not too soapy, something that turns me off of a lot of these scents, and not too sweetly cottony, another element of these sorts of candles I don’t like. It does have a slight warmth (maybe from the pear?) but that’s tempered by a sliver of sharpness (could that be the cedarwood?), making it perfect for spring and summer, though it will work year-round.

I was so excited to find two candles that Jon and I both like that I tried to use the collective power of Candle People on the internet to identify others… and so far I’ve come up empty. I did fall down a rabbit whole of YouTube candle reviews, most of which describe White T-Shirt as having a weak “throw,” a new term for me, which sounds insulting but honestly helps me narrow down future options by ruling out ones with more intensity.

Not that I desperately need more candles until the weather turns, when I would like ones that smell a little more seasonal! In the meantime, I’ll work my way through my White T-Shirt stash and count down the days until my MIL’s next visit.