My in-laws were in town for Passover, and we took the chance to check out the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was totally off season—nothing was in bloom except the daffodils—and we got rained on. But I did return from the Botanic Garden with a prize: a tomato scented candle.
The tomato scented candle enjoyed a brief moment of trendiness last summer, but I haven’t been able to let it go. I truly think that the smell of a fresh summer’s tomato is one of the most pleasing in all existence. Taking a whiff of a tomato, warm from sunlight, and smelling the earth it was grown in, the herbaceous scent of earth and water and greenery, is one of the most pleasing experiences in the world. I am a tomato lover—if you handed me a perfectly ripe tomato I would bite into it like an apple.
So far, I have bought no less than three varieties of tomato scented candles. In particular, I like these small but pungent tomato candles from Fresa out of Chicago. They also sell a cilantro candle, which will get you halfway to a salad. Much has already been written about who has the best tomato scented candle, and I have a lot more to explore—I think next on my list is the Flamingo Estates Heirloom Tomato Candle, which I’ve heard people rave about. More than just chasing a favorite tomato varietal, I think my journey is about appreciating strange and unusual scents.
I’ve also been exploring different perfumes, and on my scent journey, I have begun to resent overly sweet scents. I love florals and I love warm spices, but they’re not my top picks for how I want my body or my environment to smell every day. I want my world to smell like a fresh garden, overflowing with vegetables and herbs. While there are a lot of perfumes that evoke soil or musk, most mainstream scents aren’t willing to give me straight-up-a-salad in the way that I want (and yes, perfume people, I do know they’re out there but there’s just a lot fewer of them than sweet scents).
Savory scents are wonderful—to me, they’re grounding. They take me back to treasured memories of planting seeds in the garden with my mom and ammama, picking weeds and tending to small buds as they grew. Sweet scents are lovely too, but they can be cloying if used too much. My tolerance for sweet scents is actually pretty low. In middle school and high school most of my peers wore the sweetest possible smelling Bath and Body Works body sprays, which gave me a particular distaste for vanilla scents in basically every form.
More than anything, tomato scents remind me of summer, when the brightest, freshest tomatoes are plucked from the vine. Although we’re in early spring still, smelling a tomato in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden while waiting out a little rain reminded me of all I have to look forward to.
