Some of our candles and sprays are scented with pure essential oils, and some use a clean, phthalate-free fragrance oil. Here's how each one is made, why we use both, and how to tell exactly what you're bringing home.
Light our Lavender candle and you get lavender and nothing else, the same soft, herbal smell as a bundle hung to dry in a barn. Light Apple Orchard and the room fills with crisp apple, cranberry, and a little clove, like the walk home from the orchard with a full bag. Both smell like the real thing. They get there in two different ways, and we think you should know which is which before you buy.
Where essential oils come from
An essential oil is the aromatic oil a plant makes on its own, drawn straight out of its leaves, flowers, bark, wood, or resin. Most are steam distilled, which means steam is passed through the plant to carry the oil out, then cooled until the oil separates from the water. Citrus oils are cold pressed from the peel instead. It's the same oil that sprays into the air when you twist a strip of orange rind over a glass. Lavender, rosemary, lemongrass, peppermint, eucalyptus, and patchouli all give up their scent this way, and it takes a surprising amount of plant to do it. Roughly 150 pounds of lavender flowers go into a single pound of lavender oil.
Why some scents need fragrance oil
Some of the smells people love most can't be distilled. An apple has plenty of scent when you bite into it, but distilling one doesn't capture that crisp, sweet smell, so there's no such thing as apple essential oil. Sea air and fresh snow don't grow on anything. A tray of sugar cookies cooling on the counter is butter, sugar, and vanilla all baking together, and no single plant holds that.
For those scents, we use CandleScience CleanScents, a fragrance oil line that's free of phthalates and clear under California's Prop 65. It's made in a lab rather than drawn from a plant, and we say so plainly on every product page where we use it.
How to tell which one you're holding
Every candle, spray, and body care product we make says which it is in its description, in plain words. Our candles and room sprays come in both, so each collection is split in two: Essential Oil Candles and Fragrance Oil Candles, Essential Oil Sprays and Clean Fragrance Sprays. Our essential oil candles also carry a small crystal set into the wax, so you can tell them apart at a glance. Our bath and body products are made almost entirely with essential oils, and the few exceptions are labeled the same way.
What changes when you light them
Essential oils are light and evaporate quickly, so an essential oil candle carries its scent more softly. It fills the room you're sitting in rather than the whole floor of the house, which is why so many people love one in a bedroom or a reading corner. Give it a head start by lighting it about twenty minutes before you want the room to smell of it. Fragrance oil is made to hold steady, so it carries farther and stays consistent from the first burn to the last. We reach for one or the other depending on the evening, and we keep both at home.
One thing worth knowing
Heat and sunlight slowly break essential oils down, and citrus oils fade fastest of all. When an essential oil candle isn't lit, keep it out of a sunny window. Stored that way, it will smell like itself right down to the last half inch of the jar.
We'd rather tell you exactly what's in the jar than leave you to wonder. That's why both kinds of candle sit on our shelves, labeled side by side.