A warming winter candle scented with pure essential oils of orange, cinnamon, cedarwood and patchouli. Hand-poured in Azur's atelier in Groningen, in a handmade jesmonite vessel. 205 ml, around 40 hours.
How the blend is built
This is a properly constructed fragrance rather than a single note, and it is worth seeing the architecture.
Orange is the top — bright, immediate, and the first thing you smell. Citrus oils are the most volatile and they announce a candle before anything else arrives.
Cinnamon is the heart — warm, sweet, unmistakably seasonal. Cinnamaldehyde is what your nose is reading, and it is one of the most recognisable single molecules in the whole of perfumery.
Cedarwood and patchouli are the base — heavy, slow-evaporating and the reason the room still smells of something an hour after the candle goes out. Cedarwood is dry and pencil-shaving woody; patchouli is dark, earthy and faintly sweet.
Top, heart, base is how perfume has been built for a century, and a candle that has all three smells different at the start of an evening than at the end. One that only has a top note smells great for ten minutes and then of hot wax.
Cinnamon oil — worth knowing
Cinnamon bark oil is one of the more potent skin sensitisers in the essential oil world, and cinnamaldehyde appears on the EU's list of 26 declarable fragrance allergens.
Burning it in a candle is not the concern — the exposure is airborne and very dilute. What is worth knowing is that you should not handle undiluted cinnamon oil, and that people with fragrance sensitivity may find this the most reactive candle in the range to be in a room with. If scented candles give you a headache, this one is the likeliest culprit.
Essential oils rather than fragrance oils
Synthetic fragrance oils are engineered to survive burning and to fill a room. Essential oils are distilled plant extracts and their volatiles burn off faster, so an essential oil candle has a gentler throw. It scents the room it is in, not a house.
This blend carries better than most, because the cedarwood and patchouli base is heavy and slow — exactly the property that makes those oils useful in perfume.
What it pairs with
You will sometimes see this candle described as "a perfect match with our Wild Flower body bar" — text copied across from the Wild Flower listing. Spicy Spirit pairs with the Spicy Spirit range, not with Wild Flower.