The World in a Glass Vessel

Cinnamon’s post on her Cire Trudon candle got me reminiscing about the brand, and a poke around on their website (I guess they’re now called just Trudon? Can I type it like Trvdon because it amuses me? and oh, yeah they have a perfume line) … where was I? Their website triggered some thoughts, so here we go.

I didn’t grow up with luxury candles (or luxury anything else, for that matter) and by the time I ran across Cire Trudon in the Washington, D.C. area I was a tad more worldly. But “luxury candle” to me was the ubiquitous Rigaud, which I saw stacked up at Neiman Marcus and smelled in the homes of fancy folk my parents’ age – candles designed to make your nice home smell nicer by obliterating the fug of wet spaniels and musty Aubussons and indoor smokers at parties, still a thing in those days. Rigaud candles were strong and smelled old-money expensive to me, a big step up from the Yankee Candle store at the mall but still recognizably candle-ish with their parfum d’ambiance fruit or musk or woods or green notes. Rigaud was the familiar with a pedigree.

A Cire Trudon candle on the other hand conjured up its own little world. I loved to linger over them at various boutiques – their mysterious alchemy in gorgeous green class with that luxe gold label, often under those huge glass cloches (and maybe that’s part of the standard display?) which not only looked awesome but made it a lot easier to take in the fullness of each scent by inhaling from the cloche. I thought they all smelled amazing, but (and I had to go check the names) the ones that made the biggest impression on me were Abd el Kader which is the mint-tea one Cinnamon mentioned, Balmoral with its grassy green wildness, and (I think) Spiritus Sancti, the one that smelled like an old church, right down to the candle wax and wooden floors. (Hat tip to Ernesto, the library-in-Havana one with cigars, leather and rum which smelled fabulous but not as exotic as the others.)

Candles that purport to capture a particular place are much more common now at every price point, which makes it hard to credit just how shocking and strange those Cire Trudons were for me at first sniff. I’m not a candle expert and I don’t have any measure or opinion of their quality, but there’s a place that carries some of them here and I still think they’re stunning.

They also have a set of fragrances, none of which I’ve tried  — Yan Vassnier or Antoine Lie are listed as the creator for several of them, so they could be pretty great. (LuckyScent has some too.) At $48 for 15ml travel sprays and $240 for 100ml on the Trudon website, that seems … more like a bargain all the time, I guess. I thought these sounded particularly nice:

Bruma – Galbanum, Lavender, Iris, Violet, Leather, Labdanum (Antoine Lie)

Médie  – Mandarin, Grapefruit, French Cypress, Sambac Jasmine, Frankincense, Vetiver (Yann Vasnier)

Mortel Noir – “suggests skins heating up against one another: the strength of black pepper from Madagascar blended with incense from Somalia, myrrh and benzoin reveal the erotic spell of pure Cistus.”  {fans self} (Yann Vasnier)

I wish Trudon did some kind of fragrance discovery set like Cinnamon posted yesterday so you could try a bunch of them out – if they do, I couldn’t find it. (Of course Lucky has its usual sample program.)

Have you tried any of these? Patty did a review of them awhile ago. How do you feel about the candles?