6 Movie-Inspired Candles for Summer Vacation Season
I make movie-inspired candles. That's the whole business. And a while back I was going through my own catalog and noticed something I hadn't planned: a lot of these films are set on vacation.
Not by design. It just turns out that when you love movies enough to build a company around them, you keep gravitating toward the ones where somebody leaves home. That's most of the great summer films. Somebody goes somewhere. Something happens. They come back different, or they don't come back.
So I pulled six together into a summer vacation collection. Consider it an itinerary. Every stop is somewhere I'd love to visit and nowhere I'd want to be.
- Amity (Jaws)
- Hand Grenade (Triangle of Sadness)
- Elio (Call Me By Your Name)
- May Queen (Midsommar)
- Dear Alien (Asteroid City)
- Obsession (Saltburn)
Amity — A Jaws-Inspired Candle
Ocean water · smoking boat engine · sand dunes · beachside bonfire
The summer blockbuster that invented summer blockbusters. Amity Island in 1975, tourist season, a beach town whose entire year depends on the next few weeks.
The scent opens cold and briny, ocean water you can't see the bottom of. Then the boat engine comes through, that greasy diesel smell of a fishing vessel chugging out to deeper water. Warm sand dunes sit underneath and keep the whole thing grounded. A bonfire smolders at the finish, the kind of fire people build once they've decided they're done with the water for the day.
What I like about this one is how it moves. It starts at the shoreline and ends somewhere darker, same as the film.
Hand Grenade — A Triangle of Sadness-Inspired Candle
Sea breeze · tanning lotion · pool water · beach wood · pretzel sticks
Ruben Östlund's satire about a luxury cruise, and a very expensive vacation that everyone on board has earned in exactly the wrong way.
This is the most conventionally pleasant scent on the list, which felt like the right joke. Coconut tanning lotion, chlorinated pool water, salt air, sun-bleached wood off the deck. The pretzel note is there because somebody on that boat is always holding a drink and there's always a bowl next to it.
It smells like money. It smells like a very good time. That's the point.
Elio — A Call Me By Your Name-Inspired Candle
Apricot · peach · petitgrain · cypress · musk
Luca Guadagnino's film about six weeks in northern Italy, which might be the most beautifully photographed summer ever committed to film.
Stone fruit up front, apricot and peach, ripe and a little heavy. Petitgrain brings a green citrus off the leaves and twigs rather than the fruit. Cypress stands at the edges of everything, the way it does in that landscape. Musk underneath, warm and close.
This is the one people write to me about. Someone told me not to discontinue it. I have no plans to.
May Queen — A Midsommar-Inspired Candle
Flower dress · rune stones · wood mallet · bear pelt · burning chapel
Ari Aster's folk horror, set almost entirely in daylight, at a Swedish festival that only happens once every ninety years.
Florals first, and they're genuinely lovely. Then cold mineral from the rune stones. Raw wood. Animal fur, which is a note I don't use anywhere else and which does something specific to the whole composition. Smoke at the end.
Bright and wrong at the same time. That's the trick the movie pulls and I wanted the candle to do it too.
Dear Alien — An Asteroid City-Inspired Candle
Desert dust · space rock · pipe tobacco · martini
Wes Anderson's desert town, 1955, population 87. Not somewhere anybody chose to go. Somewhere they ended up.
Hot dust and dry mineral open it. The space rock note is the strangest thing I've built, a cold metallic edge that shouldn't work next to the dust but does. Pipe tobacco drifts through, someone smoking on a porch in the heat. And then a martini, gin and vermouth, showing up out of nowhere the way a cocktail does in an Anderson film.
One customer told me he has no reference for how space rocks smell but everything else on the list checks out. I'll take it.
Obsession — A Saltburn-Inspired Candle
Manor hallways · old tapestries · hedge maze · memorial stones · bath water · grave soil
Emerald Fennell's estate film. Somebody invites you home for the summer and the house is bigger than your entire town.
Cold stone corridors. Dust settled into old fabric. Clipped green from the hedge maze. Wet earth. There's a bath water note in here and I know exactly what you're thinking about, and yes, that's why it's there.
This is the strangest scent I make and the one I'd defend hardest. It's a summer vacation candle in the sense that the story happens in July. It does not smell like a beach. It smells like a house that's been standing for four hundred years and has opinions about you.
About These Movie-Inspired Candles
Everything is hand-poured by me in a workshop in Hollywood, California. 8 oz of all-natural soy wax in an amber apothecary jar, 40 to 50 hours of burn time, scented with essential and fragrance oils. Phthalate-free, paraben-free, vegan, never tested on animals.
Every scent is original. I develop them myself. You won't find these profiles anywhere else because they don't exist anywhere else.
Free U.S. shipping on orders over $75, which is three candles.
