Creating moods

I love entering spaces with a particular, deliberate scent. It instantly creates a mood.

I do not wear perfume on me every day, but I very much like the idea of perfuming my home. Buying unscented and mildly scented cleaning products and then adding my favorite scents on top of that.

Along with flowers and plants, I use room sprays, scented candles – regular or cold candles – and essential oils liberally in every room.

Candles make a stunning gift as long as you choose the scent well. While I sometimes like experimenting in my own home, I tend to choose fresh and subtle scents to give away.

A couple of good ones:

The pictured candle is La Marquise by Cire Trudon. It is inspired by Madame de Pompadour and it fills the air with elegant and sensual notes of verbena, lemon, white flowers and roses.

Another favorite is La Thémis by Maison Louis Marie. It contains notes of green leaves, eucalyptus, spearmint, wintergreen and tonka bean, and the scent is aromatic but subtle, not feminine, not masculine – great gift material.

In general, the candles by Maison Louis Marie are clean and sophisticated, and the soy wax base burns nicely. If you are used to getting headaches from home fragrances, you might want to give these a try.

You can not talk about scented candles without mentioning Diptyque.

Like Cire Trudon, they have been around forever and their scent selection is impressive.

Feu de Bois (Wood Fire) is a classic, it has a warm smoky smell, while Baies (Berries) smells like spring: fresh roses and crushed blackcurrant leaves.

I also love the room sprays and herbal candles by Diptyque, especially for the bathroom: Menthe Verte (Spearmint), Verveine (Lemon Verbena) and Eucalyptus, for example.