Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times
Here’s how bad it’s got: I just ordered a scented-candle-making kit. I know, I know; I am way behind the curve.
DIY pride is not a factor. I actually know how to make candles, and churn butter, and I sew (if graded on a generous curve) a fine seam.
Nor am I attempting to distract my family with yet another pandemic project. My new hobby is simply a matter of economics: I will be trying to make my own scented candles because I need to stop spending so much damn money on scented candles and I refuse to accomplish this by burning fewer of them.
Before the pandemic, I had an uneasy relationship with the turn-of-the-century boom in the home fragrance industry.
Certainly it is lovely to walk into a fig- or balsam- or hyacinth-scented room (apologies to those who are allergic or bothered by scent). But all those candles and diffusers cost money, often quite a bit, and their growing popularity seemed to be a tell of the new faux-cosy consumerism, a mark of a system that encouraged the notion that money was there to burn. In Los Angeles anyway, the fault lines of gentrification always seemed to lead to a coffee bar and a shop selling US$40 candles, often with names like Cashmere.
The furor over Meghan Markle’s penchant for Diptyque, revealed during her recent remote appearance on America’s Got Talent, was solid evidence in support of my long-held belief that scented candles were part of the luxury economy, appropriate for holidays, gift-giving and the side tables of the very rich.
So does crisis make moral cowards of us all.
I started burning candles at the beginning of the shutdown. My newly recongregated family needed a lift that did not involve consuming 2,000 extra calories per day in baked goods. And it was just for a month or two, right?
Seven months later, scented candles are now a staple; I buy them with the same regularity I buy milk, turkey burgers and toilet paper. There are used candle jars stashed in every cupboard like the empty bottles of a secret drunk.
And I’m not the only one. My older daughter’s bedroom is awash in apple cinnamon scent in an attempt to keep pace with her Temple University education seasonally as well as academically. She has learned how to trim a wick and uses terms like “a good throw” (referring to the ability of a candle to spread scent).
Whatever prejudice I had against unlikely formulations and absurd names is long gone. Home Sweet Home, Sweater Weather, Autumn Oak and Charred Juniper blaze away in every room.
“When you come home with one that says ‘Live, Laugh, Love’, I am going to have to stage an intervention,” my son said recently.
The whole point of all these candles is to create an alternate me, one who lives serenely, in a calmer, saner, more hopeful place and time. A time when how my home smells doesn’t matter so much because I am not in it 24/7.
As I informed my smart-mouthed son, science has proven that smell is the strongest trigger of memory and emotion. And frankly, triggering all the best memories and emotions has become paramount these days. We need to remember a time when we weren’t all stuck at home, our stomachs in permanent churn over pandemic and election anxieties.
In our house, the blossoms of spring gave way to the citrus of summer and now we are into the mellower aromas of autumn: apple spice, pumpkin spice, amber, musk, a little vanilla (not too much!), fig and cedar. The scents emanating from cheerful little flames not only reassure us that we don’t have Covid-19 (everyone who has never woken feeling a bit under the weather and rushed to test their sense of smell, please stand on their head), but also remind us that there are things, many important things, that exist implacably and restoratively beyond the reach of current events.
The various aromas that scent so many homes these days form their own kind of continuous prayer; that someday soon, we will not need the therapeutic power of ylang-ylang and lavender, apple and clove to soothe nerves frazzled by confinement, worry and the perpetual aggravation of a news cycle that has done its utmost to make Dorothy Parker’s phrase “What fresh hell is this?” mundane and unfunny.
After all, it is better to light a single candle than sit and curse the darkness – and if the darkness fights back, then a little pumpkin spice should do the trick.