Sustainability You Can Smell

I was lucky enough to spend a few years as a home fragrance designer and during this time I learnt a lot about the makeup of wax and the vessels in which you can sell candles and diffusers. I am by no means an expert but I was fascinated by the widely untouched prospect of sustainability in this category and set myself a mission to find out how these products are hurting the planet and what we can do to make this better. I love finding sustainability in areas outside of fashion and believe consumers need to think about every single purchase and question how, where and what it is made of.

The brand that started my home fragrance sustainability journey was Evermore London. This brand produces beautiful product and makes a lot of claims in regards to aspects of its product being sustainable. I began to take note of their claims and claims made by other fragrance brands and made them into a spreadsheet to discuss with my quality controller, lawyer and factory. I learnt that some of the claims widely used in the industry are valid however some of course are simply greenwashing.

So to begin lets run through a few claims commonly made by home fragrance brands..

Pure soy wax/100% Soy wax

This claim is a misleading as wax cannot be made from the soy alone which itself is a liquid, stabilisers are needed to create the candle wax. This is why you usually only see smaller brands getting away with this claim.

Free of toxins

There are international standards on toxins and no home fragrance product can legally contain toxic chemicals. This claim would not pass advertising standards in most countries as it infers that other brands use toxic chemicals.

Smoke-free burn

Again, there are international standards for this. No candle should produce harmful smoke, of course lower quality and candles not properly looked after may produce slightly higher levels of smoke.

Vegan

This is generally a fair claim as beeswax candles are still quite popular, they have many benefits such as a slower burn, air purifying qualities and have almost no odour whereas soy wax can effect the fragrance of the candle slightly.

Uses only essential oils

100% essential oil is thicker than artificial fragrance, and doesn’t perform well. It needs a lot of testing and development. Of course a lot of brands are doing essential oils well and in my opinion this is a fair claim to make.

Packaging FSC certified

This is a great one. FSC certification can be tricky to track and obtain as it requires tracking the fibres back to the forest in which the tree was grown. Deforestation is a huge environmental issue and FSC certifies forests all over the world to ensure they meet the highest environmental and social standards.

The next detail to consider in home fragrance is the vessel in which you hold your candle. Most often these are made of ceramic or glass. Generally (but not always) lower priced candles are made in glass vessels as this much less expensive to produce. Glass can quite easily be made from recycled material and Glass can be continually and indefinitely recycled. Glass produced from recycled scrap (or “cullet”) creates 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than glass made from raw materials. Each ton of recycled glass saves a ton of natural resources, including sand and limestone. Making products from cullet requires lower furnace temperatures for melting, further reducing energy consumption by 20-30%. Ceramics are made using minerals from our earth, are strong, long lasting and multi use. The process of creating ceramics uses alot of energy - if the factory uses renewable energy then of course this may be okay. It is notable that ceramics are said to use less energy than glass production.

Reed Diffusers have become very popular as they are long lasting and can be great additions to decor. I have seen brands claiming diffusers to be environmentally better than candles as they do not emit soot and use less resource. I think the smoke and soot claims are extreme and would be more concerned about the danger oil poses to marine life. Oil destroys the insulating ability of fur-bearing mammals, and the water repellency of a bird’s feathers, thus exposing these creatures to the harsh elements. Without the ability to repel water and insulate from the cold water, birds and mammals will die from hypothermia. When exposed to oil, adult fish may experience reduced growth, enlarged livers, changes in heart and respiration rates, fin erosion, and reproduction impairment. This is why there are legal requirements in most countries to print a warning on the packaging of every diffuser.

A great product I have found to tackle the above issue is the Nest Liquidless Diffuser which features a lovely metal vessel - which could also double as a vase. The product uses scented reeds which can be replaced rather than soaking them in oil and claims 90+ days of fragrance. The product appears to have been discontinued but I love the idea - when I discussed this with my suppliers they were not able to provide sticks with the same lifespan and I would question the 90 day claim that Nest makes. There is also something to be considered in the sticks used for reed diffusers. They are usually made from bamboo but can also be made from cotton. Both of these resources can have a terrible impact on our environment. Another similar product I have done a little testing with is fragrance balls - similar to the Nest sticks these balls emit the fragrance slowly and are made from cotton. I think these have the same merit and can come in a stylish vessel or be placed in a vessel of choice.

So thats my brain dump of home fragrance sustainability so far. There are so many products in the category and I have only covered the big two, there are many other products with exciting examples in room sprays, laundry, I have even seen sachets of wood chips sold to emit fragrance and claiming to cleanse the air in your home!