When Anthony Carro opened Candle Delirium two decades ago, he encountered a lot of skepticism from customers and other naysayers that his candle store in West Hollywood would survive.
“It’s just candles. How could it be just candles?” he remembers people saying. “For the first 10 years it was like, ‘What is he selling in the back?’ … I think they stopped saying that now.”
These days, the idea that a store might be successful selling 90 brands of luxury candles ranging from about $10 for something small to $840 for one that burns for 600 hours in a handblown glass container isn’t so far-fetched. The high-end candle market has grown extensively in recent years. But what, exactly, makes a candle so expensive? Are you just lighting your money on fire?
While luxury candles have long existed, their prevalence is still relatively new. Department stores used to be the only place to buy a pricey candle — now you can find them in a large variety of shops and online.
Plus, they’ve become status symbols for all sorts of other entities. Take the Ritz-Carlton, which sells a slew of scents that promise to “transport you to The Ritz-Carlton destinations around the world.” Most of the company’s offerings cost less than a night at one of its hotels, though maybe not the sold on its site. Singer Kacey Musgraves has also gotten into the candle game, teaming up with Boy Smells on two varieties inspired by her songs (the standard sizes will set you back $56 apiece).
Overall, American consumers spent $222 million on candles sold in prestige retailers like department and beauty specialty stores and online in the past 12 months, according to data analytics firm Circana. That number is actually down from the height of the pandemic, when candle use went into hyperdrive, but there’s still one slice of the market where demand continues to rise: candles that cost more than $75. While that category amounts to a small piece of the overall pie, units sold have increased by 25 percent year over year, per Circana.
When you fork over a small fortune for a jar of wax, what are you really paying for? Some materials used to produce luxury candles — the fragrances in particular — are indeed pricey, often significantly more so than those used in bargain products. But there’s also an element of branding that goes into many of the products selling at the highest prices.
“Certainly you can get cheaper candles, but it’s about more than a candle,” says Katie Thomas, who runs the Kearney Consumer Institute, which studies consumer behavior data. “It’s about an essence or a vibe somebody is trying to put out there.”
If people are looking to buy a luxury product, candles are a relatively inexpensive way to do that. Take popular fashion house Loewe — its smallest candle will run you $120, but that’s still far cheaper than one of the designer’s $1,250 cotton and silk shirts.
Despite the idea that a particular brand might signal something about a person’s identity or lifestyle, people still want something that smells good. And that often costs money.
Lyndsey Gibson, vice president of product and business operations at candle making supplier CandleScience, says that “most people are fragrance-first. That’s the thing that they’re the most concerned about. And honestly, that’s the thing that can vary widely in price.”
Luxury candles tend to be made with oils from “fragrance houses” — companies that provide smells for products ranging from perfumes to detergents. Many of these oils have a mixture of components, including essential oils (derived from plants without artificial add-ins), carrier oils and synthetics.
“You can get an oil that’s $2 a pound and you can get an oil that’s $80 a pound,” Carro says. “That changes a candle from $10 to $60, literally, because you’re putting an ounce, an ounce and a half, two ounces in there.”
Whether the splurgier option is worth it depends on the sensitivity of your nose. “If someone stuck a candle in front of me, I can close my eyes and I could tell how much that candle, how much those oils cost,” Carro says. Then again, he has owned a candle shop for the past two decades. Could the average consumer distinguish the difference?
He likens it to champagne or caviar — you can refine your nose or palate to recognize subtle differences. Many people would be able to smell the difference between a $5 bargain candle and a $140 luxury version. The cheaper candle probably has a more chemical-forward aroma and fewer fragrance notes. It gets tougher to discern the contrast, however, when you’re comparing similarly priced candles, for instance one at $40 and another at $60.
Part of how we experience the way something smells has nothing to do with our nose. Meg Michelsen, a professor of marketing at Longwood University, studies how scent impacts consumer behavior. For one experiment, she provided the same scent to people, packaged either as “Lavender Bouquet” or “Floral Bouquet,” and asked how likely they were to buy it. The experiment determined that more people wanted to buy the less specific “Floral Bouquet.”
“When a consumer thinks about it, they just think about a very generic and very general floral scent,” says Michelsen, while a more particular name leaves more room for people to feel like their expectation hasn’t been met.
And there are certainly trends for “in” scents. Fragrances that begin as high-end do ultimately filter down to lower price points — Carro likens this to the from “The Devil Wears Prada.” When Carro opened Candle Delirium, fruity and floral-scented candles were all the rage. Then, there was a big swing toward heavier scents, like amber and sandalwood. Now, candle makers are selling a lot of tomato candles (think fresh and summery, not simmering pot of marinara sauce).
Gibson has noticed an increase in customers who are interested in the idea of an all-natural candle, and businesses that try to cater to that demand. (There is no regulatory body overseeing the claims made on candles and their relative naturalness.) In particular, she has observed a shift away from paraffin wax, a byproduct of petroleum distillation, toward plant-based waxes like soy, coconut and even apricot.
And then there’s the vessel for all that wax and fragrance. This is where the cost of materials meets branding. An artfully crafted porcelain or glass container costs money to produce, and it also reflects the candle’s status as luxe.
Larissa Jensen, global beauty industry adviser at Circana, says it’s “the same type of dynamic of owning a luxury handbag. It’s more than just the bag. It represents something — it’s reflective maybe of your elevated taste and your style.”
And unlike the wax and fragrance, which burn down to nothing, the vessel can pull double duty as home decor, or go on to perform another purpose. Beauty influencers on social media often use them to hold cosmetics.
But even with all-natural ingredients and a stunning container, an ultra expensive candle has probably been priced at a significant markup. “Some of the prices that I see out there are just, to me, laughable,” says Gibson, the wholesaler. “But you know what? Somebody out there is willing to pay it.”