Welcome to the perfume room. My Sunday the day today is not a fragrance, but a very special

candle that I recently received in PR. And it is special because it's a collaboration between past

perfume room guest, internet candle darling, and my friend Sir Candleman, and the esteemed

candle brand Lafco. The candle is called Heart of the Matter, and at her core, she is a

vanilla for the vanilla lover and hater alike. And I'll be honest, in these two categories,

I do tend to fall into the latter because,

and while I will say there are certainly exceptions,

heart of the matter,

I just can't do like a cupcake icing vanilla candle.

I find it to be too cloying in a space.

Leave it to Sir Candleman to come up with a vanilla

that only makes friends.

So let's discuss. The notes are vanilla, guayakwood, and cumin, and in non-fragrance terms,

it smells a little something like this. Imagine that sort of like dusty, cocoay, slightly

sweet smell of like cocoa powder.

Okay?

Then add a vanilla bean accent, something distinctly vanilla pod versus vanilla icing.

All of this is tempered with this sort of like warm, dry woods feel, a smell that doesn't quite feel like a sauna or like that of burning Palo Santo, but feels like in that wheelhouse,

like a cousin of the two. I get something like a little salty even and not like the ocean, okay,

but instead salty like, okay, have you ever sprinkled salt on top of ice cream? One, if you have not,

you should. And two, you know how salt on top of ice cream adds this like

salty sweet dichotomy that simultaneously enhances but also softens the original flavor? In here,

...