Behind the Scents: 2018 Fall and Holiday Fragrance Launch

We’re proud of our fragrance oils.

Not just because our customers give us great feedback year after year on their quality and performance, but also because every scent we sell is a graduate of our vetting and testing program. Only the best of the best earn their diploma. Making it as a CandleScience fragrance is harder than getting into Harvard. (Yes, really! We've done the math.) 

Selecting scents for your candles, soaps, and other creations is one of the most enjoyable parts of the process, and also one of the most difficult. With so much to consider—Will my customers like this? Will I like this? How will it perform in soy? Will it discolor my wax? Will the hot throw be as strong as the cold throw?—picking out new scents can feel like a game of chance.

It’s a game many of us are familiar with as candle and soap makers ourselves, one we’re not very fond of playing. That familiarity deeply informs our process for adding new fragrances; we know those frustrations all too well, so it is crucial for us that we do everything possible to eliminate all the mystery and guesswork we can. You may have noticed that CandleScience doesn’t carry a staggering number of fragrances like many suppliers. That’s because our standards for fragrance oils aren’t just high, they’re rigorous.

Before we even begin the process of vetting and testing fragrances, we are listening—to trends in the market, industry reports, the competitive landscape… But the voice most important to us is yours.

Every piece of feedback we receive about our fragrance oils, every search on our website, every request for new scents, we track. We often find common threads between your feedback and the target list of potential additions and revisions we’ve already compiled.

Many fragrance concepts won’t even make it to this point, as they simply don’t meet our most recent safety and regulatory standards. You may have noticed our ongoing commitment to phasing out phthalates in all of our fragrances. But of course, safety is just the baseline. When we’re testing fragrances, we pay attention to strength, character, and burnability.

• Does this scent perform to our standards in soy wax? Is the strength of the hot throw consistent with the cold throw? 
• Does this scent have the character we’re looking for? Is it distinct from others on the market?
• Does this fragrance give us a proper burn? Is the flame too small or large? Are we getting a sooty candle?

Because we all experience scents differently, our testing process is a group effort. Everyone at CandleScience, from tech to marketing, gets involved in evaluating fragrances. Usually, we spend a couple months testing multiple revisions of a single scent but as you’ll see, sometimes it takes a little longer.