‘Perfumers are magicians’ — the secret duo behind luxury candles

At least once a week an email lands at the offices of United Perfumes asking for urgent help, invariably from a “household name” in luxury. “They don’t understand why their scented candles aren’t working,” says Chris Yu, who runs the London-based company alongside Laurent Delafon. “You can’t just put whatever fragrance you already have into a candle. We spend hours working on formulations, talking about what kind of wick works with certain blends, the shape of a vessel.”

Delafon and Yu aren’t perfumers. They call themselves “interpreters” — a go-between for designers and chemists, offering a lingua franca for each. This month, three ovoid-shaped black glass and metal Alexander McQueen candles created with the brand’s designer Sarah Burton will be released: Ghost Flower, Pagan Rose and Savage Bloom. Priced at £295, they’ve taken years of conversation and development. “Sarah is using Pagan Rose to fragrance the stores,” says Yu, when I meet him and Delafon at their Marble Arch office. “It’s the smell of smoked peat moss, with florals breaking through.”

Even before they founded a business officially in 2007, the duo disrupted the home fragrance industry by bringing Diptyque to London in 2001. They had both recently pivoted professionally — Chris from investment banking, Laurent from marketing — and collided through mutual contacts. A shared love of fragrance, and a meeting with Diptyque’s founders, saw Delafon being given the licence to distribute the then modestly sized Paris brand in the UK and Ireland and open a store in London. It now has over 90 shops worldwide.

“I remember one of my first clients for Diptyque was Madonna,” says Delafon. “I hadn’t even signed the contract with the brand. I heard from a friend that she wanted 300 specific Tubereuse candles for an album launch ‘from some obscure French brand’. I laughed and made the deal.” Soon after, Yu joined him, and for years they worked the shop floor personally, both at Diptyque and then at Cire Trudon on London’s Chiltern Street, when they were handling distribution for the luxury French candle brand.

It was while working with Italian design company Fornasetti that they met with Bertrand de Préville, general manager of IFF, the multinational flavour and fragrance production corporation, and had a revelation. “It was the first time we encountered raw natural materials,” recalls Yu. “We were handed a testing strip and waxed lyrical — was this lychee, elderflower . . . something new by Stella McCartney?! We were told ‘No, it’s just pure rose.’ It was multi-dimensional and alive. We realised, if you have phenomenal raw materials, it encourages curiosity and creativity.”

Many designers have a tale they want to tell through scent. Tom Dixon, who had been a fan of Diptyque, called on Delafon and Yu in 2009 with briefs that Yu calls “very Tom — he talked about the smell of Dagenham after the rain and wet concrete. A lot of our training about how to interpret brands started with that project.” The “London” candle is still a core product for Dixon.

Candles can turn a profit, but investing in them is a gamble. As perfumer Roja Dove tells me: “The amount you spend developing a great candle, then on packaging and shipping, make it an extraordinarily expensive endeavour.” Dixon has had success because his candles, like Diptyque and Trudon, have an impressive “hot throw” — the industry term for pronounced aroma while burning (as opposed to “cold throw” — the smell of a candle unboxed). The new candles from United Perfumes’ own brand Ostens, for example, have tapered glass vessels to accentuate hot throw, and each wick was selected for the most effective density and material. As with all the candles they have been involved with, the ingredients include rapeseed vegetal wax and mineral wax (paraffin). Yu believes that soy candles do not give the same strength of aroma as candles containing paraffin, which are “unfairly demonised” because they can give off black smoke.

As with fine wine, few have the vocabulary to describe complex fragrances, let alone create them

As with fine wine, few have the vocabulary to describe complex fragrances, let alone create them. Which is where Delafon and Yu step in. When Paul Smith walked me through the launch of his range of candles at a Soho townhouse last year, rooms had been styled to represent each aroma. We paused to smell Daydreamer, in a bright yellow space full of straw, arranged like a minimalist, sunshine-themed Walter de Maria installation. “This was all about Chris and Laurent asking me about my memories of holidays,” said Smith. “I talked about cycling in France, and fields of freshly turned hay.”

In his office, Yu lines up the Smith candles with their noticeably different styles of wick: “It was great working with Paul because he said he never wears a fragrance and didn’t know where to start. We talked about breakfast, and what he liked on his toast. We experimented with different strengths of the rind element of marmalade. We talked about cycling, and created something that had the essence of Lycra.”

How, I ask, do you create the smell of Lycra? “This is why I love perfumers, because they are magicians,” replies Yu. “To make a floral smell, you have to use black pepper. Smell a snapped leaf — you get a hit of pepper. It tricks you into thinking ‘freshness’. Rubber, latex and concrete all have a fragrance in them. You can’t launch a successful shampoo without the essence of green apple in there, because that’s what our brain think equates to clean hair. You can conjure up anything in a lab.”

Emotive responses can be profound — as Yu says, “psychotherapists now frequently ask clients to bring a special scent to a session”. One of the best-selling candles at Trudon remains Spiritus Sancti, reminiscent of the roiling incense from a thurible at Catholic mass. “I lifted the cloche to let a customer smell it one afternoon at the store,” says Yu. “She started crying. She said it transported her straight back to being surrounded by nuns at boarding school.”

Delafon and Yu translate stories into science. Anya Hindmarch emailed me about working with them in 2017: “I was obsessed with creating the fragrance from my childhood of pencils being sharpened, and they were able to connect me to the best noses in the business to deliver.” When they worked with Faye Toogood in 2011, she wanted something “of the woods”, and the result was a challenging mushroom aroma. Yu was asked to create a fragrance for the Rick Owens store in Paris: “The brief was ‘the prince’s corpse’. He did it, they pumped it into the Palais Royal store, and people walked in and straight out. It was a faecal jasmine and highly polarising. So they pulled it. But Rick loved it!”

Next month, United Perfumes’ own brand, Ostens, begins selling its Illumination range of Rose, Cashmeran Velvet and Jasmine candles in Selfridges. Ostens launched in 2018 but they’ve been building it slowly alongside all those high-profile consultancies. “These candles represent a collection of our best ideas, kept for ourselves,” says Yu. “Things that didn’t work out with other clients, but that we love.” Each scent is immediately appealing: radiant hot throw, but no hint of mushroom or cadaverous royalty.

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