Scent Ingredients: understanding what’s real, and what’s marketing
a.k.a. consumer literacy for ingredient connoisseurs
When setting out to buy something of genuine quality, there’s nothing more disappointing than discovering it isn’t what it seemed. The “cashmere” sweater that’s mostly polyester. The “luxury” candle that smells just like every other department store scent.
In fragrance, as in food and fabric, ingredients — and the language used to describe them — matter. Terms like “essential oils” and “ luxury fragrance” are often used generously, and not always precisely. Even the most discerning among us can be misled by language that sounds reassuring, but isn’t particularly specific.
I care a lot about both ingredients and language (yes, probably to an annoying degree). In this post, I’m answering a few common questions about essential oils and scent ingredients — so you can recognise quality when you encounter it.
Q. Are all high-end candles made with the best and cleanest ingredients?
Myth: If I pay more, it must be made with the best ingredients, right?
It’s very tempting to assume that price is a reliable shortcut for quality.
In reality, price often reflects perception and positioning more than it reflects materials or ethics. Extravagant packaging, glossy campaigns and international distribution all come at a cost — and those costs are reflected in the price.
Synthetic fragrance oils and paraffin wax are often used by big brands because they are stable, predictable and easily reproduced at scale. Essential oils, by contrast, are natural, living ingredients with opinions — subtle, variable and expensive — which makes them more challenging for large brands to use consistently.
It’s also worth remembering that price isn’t a guarantee of sensory quality. A candle can be costly, and beautifully presented, yet still smell overpowering or artificial to the person lighting it.
Myth clarified: A higher price doesn’t guarantee ingredient or scent quality.
Q. Are all small batch home scents made with the best and cleanest ingredients?
Myth: If it’s made on a small scale, it must use good ingredients, right?
It’s very easy to assume that something made in a home kitchen, or sold at a market, must automatically use ‘better’ ingredients than mass produced versions. Unfortunately, it’s not always the case. In reality, the ingredients used in home scents have more to do with cost, availability and technical difficulty than where they’re made or sold.
Essential oils are expensive, variable, and challenging to work with. Fragrance oils are generally cheaper, more predictable, and easier to formulate consistently. For those reasons, many small-scale makers use fragrance oils. “Small batch” does not automatically tell you what ingredients have been used.
Myth clarified: '“Handmade/artisan” doesn’t automatically equal “natural ingredients”. “Small batch” describes scale, not ingredients.
Q. Do you make your own essential oils?
Myth: If the candle maker also makes the essential oils, that must be better than buying them?
I’m sometimes asked whether I make my own essential oils. The short answer is no — because producing essential oils at any meaningful scale is an extraordinary and highly specialised undertaking.
To produce the 30+ essential oils I use in my studio would require fields of lavender, citrus groves, forests of cinnamon trees, marshes of vetiver grass, skilled harvest crews, specialised distillation equipment, and years — often generations — of agricultural and technical knowledge.
The people who produce excellent essential oils are not hobbyists. They are expert growers and distillers, working in specific climates and landscapes. Extracting oil from grapefruit skin is a completely different process to extracting oil from geraniums, which is different again from working with bark, roots, seeds or grasses. Each plant requires its own timing, technique and equipment.
Myth clarified: Buying excellent essential oils from skilled producers isn’t a shortcut, it is the craft. (And nobody needs to experience my amateur-hour attempts at distilling kilos of lavender flowers).
Q. Will lavender oil solve all my problems?
Myth: If I buy a natural ingredient candle, made with essential oils, it will fix my whole life?
I work exclusively with essential oils in my studio because they smell beautiful, and because I enjoy the daily craft of working with real ingredients — not because they promise transformation.
That’s not to say these oils don’t have well-studied benefits. Many do. It’s simply not my primary focus.
I use essential oils for the same reason I choose to wear natural fibres, cook with good ingredients, and try to avoid overly processed food: because it both simplifies and improves daily life.
Essential oils can create a beautiful atmosphere, and bring a moment of sensory delight to every day. There is growing evidence that interacting with the scents and scenery of nature has measurable benefits to wellbeing (and I’ve seen their power in real life). But on an average Tuesday, let’s not ask them to fix our lives, let’s just enjoy them.
Myth clarified: Essential oils can be supports, not silver bullets. Let’s enjoy them the way we enjoy good bread, fresh air, or a well-made sweater — as small, meaningful upgrades to everyday life.
In conclusion
It may make me an anorak — and possibly someone to be avoided at parties — but I’m drawn to this level of specificity because I think people deserve it. I like when things mean what they say, and say what they mean.
Quality in fragrance isn’t always about price, branding, or how reassuring the label sounds. It comes down to materials, every time. The more we understand what’s actually in the things we bring into our homes, the easier it becomes to choose well — and to recognise quality when we encounter it.
