Why This Luxury Candle Costs $660
Narrator: This massive Trudon candle will set you back $660. Sylvie uses this contraption to make sure each of the five wicks is perfectly straight as she fills the glass container with specially formulated wax.
Christine Agin: The more the wick is straight and centered, the more perfect the burn will be.
Narrator: That’s why Christine will spend the 2 ½ hours it takes to straighten 3,000 wicks on these smaller candles by hand. And while these cost less than the five-wick candle, at $52 each, they’re still more than three times the price of a $17 Yankee candle of similar size.
Every step of the process at Trudon’s candle factory in Normandy, France, has been honed over 350 years to create candles that burn evenly, smoke-free, and don’t sputter. So, what made these candles good enough for Marie Antoinette? And why are they so expensive?
Trudon goes back to 1643, and back then, its products served an essential purpose.
Julien Pruvost: We were the light bulbs, probably the best at the time.
Narrator: You could find the bright white, clean-burning candles everywhere from the churches of Paris to Marie Antoinette’s chambers in Versailles.
Julien Pruvost: We come from know-how that responded to a real need for lighting. All this has obviously been completely turned upside down by the course of history.
Narrator: The basics of candle-making are simple. Pour melted wax into a glass with a wick. But a luxury candle must take those base components and elevate them. Many cheaper candles use a base of petroleum-based paraffin wax, while luxury brands tend to opt for natural waxes. Up until 2018, Trudon used blends featuring beeswax in its candles.
Nathalie Egbert: We decided not to use beeswax here anymore. It is an animal wax, which does not allow us to make vegan products for people.
Narrator: Now, the company uses some paraffin wax but relies on vegetable oil for most of its candles.
Nathalie Egbert: The base oils that we use are mainly rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, since we have to use supports with fairly high melting points.
Narrator: The wax melts overnight, and fragrances are added in the morning right before pouring. Trudon’s most popular scented candle is filled by machine. But its highest-end offerings, like this $660 great-size candle, are filled by hand.
Sylvie Lemore: So the most difficult thing, let’s say, is carrying the buckets.
Narrator: Sylvie Lemore glues five large wicks to the bottom of the jar with a squeeze of silicon.
Sylvie Lemore: Then we put on the stop wicks. This is what ensures that the candle will not explode. We always have to have a stop sign.
Narrator: And when the wicks are dry, in goes the wax.
Sylvie Lemore: In general, that’s 7 kilos of material in a single fitting. We fill it a little like this because the large candle is worked over two days.
Narrator: As the wax dries, it constricts, leaving space around the edges and deformities that require a second pour. It takes hours to dry completely, but there’s really only one way to know.
Sylvie Lemore: We can’t do visuals. You have to touch it. Because you have to know that a candle has to be understood in order to work with it. Because she’s like us. She’s alive.
Narrator: But before Sylvie can complete the second pour, it’s time to pinch the wicks. And same goes for the small versions.
Christine Agin: So here we are at the pinching stage. This is the most important step before the second pour, and it is the step where we have to center the wick as best as possible.
Narrator: Christine tugs and straightens each wick.
Christine Agin: There is still no machine that straightens the strands individually. The goal is for the wick not to shrink back inside. Hence the importance of straightening it and pulling it upwards.
Narrator: Crooked or wilted wicks can affect the evenness of the burn.
Christine Agin: Because it is straight and centered, it will burn the entire wax. No side will burn more than the other.
Narrator: And not all wicks are created equal. The lab optimizes wick sizes based on the chemical formulas of the different scents. But not all of Trudon’s offerings are meant to be burned, even when they do have wicks.
Sylvia Bernal: In fact, it would burn very badly because given the wick, we might manage to burn the head a little.
Narrator: Sylvia Bernal has worked at Trudon for three years, but she has more than a decade of experience making wax busts. The bust collection is unique to Trudon. It’s a collaboration with the French National Museum Council, which provided the first molds.
Julien Pruvost: Nevertheless, they remain full-scale reproductions of busts that you can see in certain French museums and even some times abroad.
Narrator: But even if they’ll never see a flame, these wax sculptures are still created with the same attention to detail as Trudon’s more traditional offerings.
Julien Pruvost: These are still candles. And these busts have a wick on the top of their head.
Sylvia Bernal: We’re going to slip a wick into him. So here it is the unmolding of a Napoleon bust. We remove it from its shell. I’ll put it there.
Narrator: But the mold only does part of the work.
Sylvia Bernal: Now we are going to attack the finishing. In fact, I’m tweaking it a little because as it’s two-part mold, there are still the ridges of the mold on the sides. So I remove all that, all the little marks that there may be. We try to smooth as much as possible.
Narrator: She can also add material.
Sylvia Bernal: It has a hole that I don’t really like, I’m filling it, hoping that it doesn’t show too much.
Narrator: And if there’s a hole too big to fill or some other major flaw...
Sylvia Bernal: And we put it in the little pot over there, and we do it again.
Narrator: The busts are made from paraffin wax, sometimes with a little added support, a taper candle, to hold everything in place.
Sylvia Bernal: It’s not the wick. It’s just the spine.
Narrator: One of the final steps is lightly melting the foot of the bust on a hot plate to flatten it.
Sylvia Bernal: So that the foot is regular, stable, and smooth.
Julien Pruvost: But above all, they are objects which are made to be collected and not burned. We wouldn’t necessarily want a plaster bust of Napoleon at home, and the simple fact that it is made of wax gives him a shift and makes the object interesting.
Narrator: Nathalie Egbert is working on improving Trudon’s wax formulas even further. Here, candles burn in olfactory chambers all day long. She periodically evaluates their scent and tests how well they burn.
Nathalie Egbert: We have to evaluate the candles every four hours. So we light them in the morning at 8:30 a.m.; we evaluate them at 1:30 p.m., then at 5:30 p.m.
Narrator: Evaluating the smell of new candles is the most subjective part of her job.
Nathalie Egbert: So here we are going to evaluate the burning candles, that is to say, the fragrance that is released when hot from the finished products. Here, we are at the beginning of the combustion and we have rather volatile notes, such as rustic citrus notes, a little orange blossom, flowery ylang-ylang.
Narrator: She notes her feedback and works with the company’s various development teams to perfect the formula.
Nathalie Egbert: The development of a finished product includes [olfactory] evaluation, fatigue, but also the qualities of burning, therefore the flame height, the wax which does well. We have fairly specific quality criteria here. So developing a candle in the laboratory will take us almost a month.
Narrator: The lab is also responsible for quality control. It’s this attention to detail that sets luxury candles apart. The global luxury candle market is expected to be worth more than a billion dollars by 2030.
Julien Pruvost: Today, the demand for so-called luxury scented candles is very high. The one we are best known for costs 90 euros. We could make an analogy with other products on the market, whether it be a bag, leather goods, or sophisticated luxury ready-to-wear. So there is this notion of heritage, respect for what has been done to bring it to life at the present moment and in the future. So it’s a kind of fundamental reverence that’s important.
