Baies Scented Candle

A candle is usually sold on its smell and nothing else, which leaves out the part you actually control. How you light Baies in its first hour decides whether you get sixty hours out of it or forty.

Diptyque's Baies is a blackcurrant candle, the fruit picked with leaves and stems still attached and cut with rose, poured into a 190 gram glass that burns for around sixty hours. The wax is not one wax but a blend of several, matched to the fragrance concentrate and then to a wick chosen for that particular pairing, and poured in two factories, one near Paris and one in Provence. The first burn has to run until the melted pool reaches the glass on all sides, roughly four hours, because a wick that never melts the edge digs a tunnel straight down the middle and the wax around it is simply lost. After that, four hours is the limit for any one sitting. Trim the wick back to three or five millimetres before each light, and stop when only five millimetres of wax is left, or sooner if the metal wick base shows.

Scent reaches the room after about twenty minutes, and Diptyque sizes this format for small and medium rooms. The house started in 1963 in Saint-Germain-des-Prés with three candles from Yves Coueslant, Christiane Gautrot and Desmond Knox-Leet, and the collection now runs past fifty scents. The jar is built to be kept: a wax refill for the classic size costs less than the candle it replaces.