This time of year tends to get chilly and dim early, and the house feels noticeably cozier with a candle burning. A warm light and a familiar scent make the season easier to enjoy. So, today’s question fits the moment well.

Saturday Question #285:

What Is Your Favorite Scented Candle?

Do you repeat-purchase any scent, or do you explore new ones every time you choose the next candle?

My Answer

A flickering light that immediately makes any room warmer. A scent that gradually fills all the available space and lingers long after a candle is put out. Candles are festive, calming, relaxing and romantic…

Theoretically, I love candles – and not only scented ones. And at any time, I have at least 2-3 of them at home. But many years with Rusty, who mercilessly hunted any burning wick from a Hanukkah shamash to a birthday candle, taught me never to leave them unattended. As a result, a candle that is burned for half an hour during dinner and then safely retired to the cupboard will serve me for at least a couple of years. And even if I don’t love them, I can’t bring myself to throw them away.

I rarely buy candles; I use those that I get as gifts from friends or as a GWP. So, I can’t say that I have any real favorites. I do love my Ormonde Jayne Ta’if candle that I received as part of a gift set. But since that perfume is one of my all-time favorites, I don’t want to use it as an ambiance scent. Everything else was fine while it lasted, but I never wanted to repeat any of the candles I finished.

This year, I discovered something I wish I had found much earlier – a candle warmer. I’m sure I was the last one to learn about it, but just in case anyone else managed to miss this trend: it is a lamp that melts a candle placed under it without actually burning it. I love the idea, and it has become part of my daily evening ritual. You can choose the intensity of the light and use the timer. Some models (not the one I got) also allow you to change the distance from the candle to the light. And now I am on a quest to find the best winter candle to enjoy with my candle warmer.

How about you?

What Is Your Favorite Scented Candle?

It feels like this question needs a bit of context. When we encounter new perfumes, we try them, sometimes like them (though more often not), may revisit later or test them in different settings, and eventually either warm up to them or decide they’re not for us. That’s the “organic” path. But have you ever read a wonderful story about a perfume, fallen for the bottle, thought the notes were exactly up your alley, or even gone for a blind buy – and then, unwilling to be fully disappointed after the first sniff, kept returning to it, trying to talk yourself into thinking you probably… sort of… maybe like it?

Saturday Question #284:

Have You Ever Tried to Talk Yourself into Liking a Perfume?

Did you succeed?

My Answer

Yes, I have done it so many times. I realized that recently when, after wearing several perfumes, I got the feeling that I wasn’t really enjoying them — and that made me think back to how they got into my collection. At least several of them were the result of my insistent work on liking them. Today I probably wouldn’t have bought them. But since they are in my collection, I won’t be naming those full-bottle half-regrets. Instead, I’ll mention just several of the significantly less costly results of mental experiments on myself (believe me, there were many more).

Iris Rebelle by Atelier Cologne. I read a compelling review by who back then was my “scent twin.” I like iris as a note in perfumes. I liked the brand. I tried it and kind of liked it. Bought a travel spray. I featured it in the Scent Semantics #7: BRILLIANCE post several years ago, wore it once since then – and never even think about it.

Cuir de Lancome. It was one of everybody’s darlings 12-15 years ago. I liked it, but I liked it abstractly, from a swapped sample and later from a small decant a perfumista friend shared with me. It was still not too expensive to buy back then, but I kept telling myself that I needed to finish the decant first… And whenever it was mentioned on a blog, and commenters would all agree what a great perfume it was, I would again feel a pang of regret for not owning a bottle and try it again, telling myself that I liked it… I never bought it, and once my decant got empty (I’m not sure whether from me wearing it or from evaporation), I stopped thinking about it.

Dom Rosa by Les Liquides Imaginaires. I tried it when I visited one of the local perfumeries and liked it enough to buy it as one of five samples from that visit. But trying it again at home, I could never recreate the same feeling I experienced at the store. Still, it kept popping up for sale at a very reasonable price, so each time I would go back to my sample, hoping to recapture that initial infatuation. I remember my insistence. Luckily for me, I finished the sample and entered a verdict in my database: “Nice but nothing special.”

How about you?

Have You Ever Tried to Talk Yourself into Liking a Perfume?

As we explore perfumes over the years, we tend to collect not just bottles but also fascinating details about them. Whether it’s something about ingredients, chemistry or history, those little bits of trivia add even more charm to our hobby.

Saturday Question #283:

What’s the Most Interesting Perfume Fact You’ve Learned?

It doesn’t have to be an obscure or groundbreaking fact – just something that surprised or intrigued you when you first learned it. Maybe it’s something many perfumistas learn sooner or later, but most people outside our hobby wouldn’t know.

My Answer

I recently came across something called “olfactory training” or “smell training,” which involves regularly smelling some distinct scents (e.g., rose, lemon, clove and eucalyptus) and consciously trying to identify them. Research shows that these simple exercises act like a workout for the brain, helping to keep memory and thinking skills sharper over time. Clinical trials with older participants and patients with early Alzheimer’s suggest that this kind of mental engagement can have measurable benefits.

For example, in one recent study, participants aged 60–85 in an “enriched” group were exposed to seven different pleasant scents each week, one per night, for two hours using diffusers, while a control group received only tiny amounts of the scents. After six months, the enriched group showed significantly greater improvement on a word‑list recall test, and brain scans revealed changes in a neural pathway known to decline with age.

It’s not a treatment for dementia, of course, but at least our perfume habit has an excuse for being indulgent: it’s brain exercise! Time for round two: let’s see if I can finally pick out a few notes in the latest batch of samples.

What’s the Most Interesting Perfume Fact You’ve Learned?

With Halloween just behind us, it feels fitting to bring up something genuinely scary for any perfume lover: discovering that a bottle of a favorite perfume has gone off. It doesn’t happen often with bottles, and mostly we deal with evaporating decants and spoiled samples, but when it does, we’re left deciding what to do with it.

Saturday Question #282:

What Do You Do with a Perfume Bottle That’s Gone Off?

Do you throw it away? Save somewhere? Keep on your shelf?

A bonus question: what was the last perfume that you discovered spoiled in your collection?

My Answer

After our discussion about Italian perfumes in our collections two weeks ago, I felt an urge to wear Prada‘s Infusion d’Iris (EdP), which I hadn’t reached for yet this year. I took the bottle out of its box, did a “control spray” into the sink (sometimes it helps to “clean out” some aged juice from the spraying mechanism), and then carelessly aimed the next portion at my wrist… Luckily for me, it hadn’t become rancid or really unpleasant. But it completely lost the opening citrus, I’m not sure I smell any iris, and even galbanum seems quite muted. My sink was treated to a couple more sprays, after which I applied more perfume to different parts of my body. With the same result. It gets more recognizable two hours into development, but overall, it is not the perfume I fell in love with many years ago.

The bottle still has about 20% of its volume. I do not think I will ever want to wear it in its current state again (as I said, it’s not unpleasant, but it’s not pleasant enough for me to want to put it on my skin). As I calculated from my 2012 post (Alien wears Prada Infusion d’Iris), I bought it the same year it was released – 2007. So, it was a good run. And I cannot make myself throw it away. So most likely it’ll go into my “retirement” box, where I store perfumes that I stopped wearing either because they spoiled or I had a change of heart and didn’t want to finish the remaining perfume, but couldn’t bring myself to part with them. And since that box contains some bottles I got 25 years ago (or even earlier), my old favorite Infusion d’Iris doesn’t have to worry about its fate. Well, at least until the rest of my collection decides to follow suit – and this is a horrifying thought.

How about you?

What Do You Do with a Perfume Bottle That’s Gone Off?