Let’s be real: Goest candle samples

I started this account four years ago (!) so I could have a place to talk about candles and scents and all the ways they make me feel. I also wanted to review candles honestly, because I google the hell out of anything I’m tempted to purchase without smelling first, and I always appreciate finding the odd detail that seals the deal (referencing another scent I love) or makes me abandon my cart (any mention of jasmine or the ocean). Finding the candle community on Instagram has been wonderful – my husband always says “How are your smell friends?” I love all my new smell friends, just living in my phone, talking about smells! Over the years a few kind candle companies have even offered to send me a candle, which was like the height of my dreams when this began! But recently I’ve had a run of Not Great purchases, and I felt like I couldn’t share my true thoughts about them. You never want to kick a small business or make someone feel bad. But I started this so I had an outlet to share things like the candle I bought recently that I told a friend smelled like “getting a headache in a Red Lobster.” I don’t want to kiss ass and I don’t want to write a burn book (ha), but I do want to share how smelling things genuinely makes me think and feel, which is usually sense memories and weird associations and intrusive thoughts, stream-of-consciousness shit. So today I’m reclaiming my place to be weird about smells, and apologies to Goest but their candle sampler is what prompted this.

The Goest sample discovery set was a bit of a white whale for me for years. Props to them for offering it; every candle maker should. I’d heard so many rave reviews about Goest candles, especially Pablo, but wasn’t going to cough up $78 on a blind buy especially when one of the notes was “fresh plaster.” I LOVE when a scent note list gets weird; that’s what I’m here for. But it’s so rare for someone to actually nail a weird note, and I’m not spending $$$, or even $$, to be disappointed. Annoyingly, the discovery set was forever out of stock, but the moment it was back I went for it. Ten bucks. Very glad I did. Here are my thoughts.

CITADELLE

From the Goest website:

Notes: Rain, Sun, Freshly Washed Marble.

Aspects: Exalted, Flawless, Fresh, Real.

Me:

When I was 10 I went to a summer arts day camp held in a community center located in a park. All day we’d use Cray-Pas and watercolors, and when our divorced instructors would blast the radio from pastel boomboxes while they went on smoke breaks, we’d stack magic markers and have sword fights. We were allowed 30 minutes outside in the park for lunch. One time we found an abandoned bra in the creek. A boy named Tony picked it up and threw it and I knew then I would never speak to him. There was a soda machine stocked with Cherry Coke outside in a little paved atrium with a bench and a pebbledash ashtray. Every morning as you walked through, the summer sun would hit the concrete and the entire atrium would radiate baked piss. 

I would not buy this candle.

WAY OUT WEST

From the Goest website:

Notes: Leather, Spring Water Minerals, Ashes.

Aspects: Adventuresome, Elusive, Naturalist.

Me:

Have you ever been 15 and in a car with someone you know you aren’t supposed to be in a car with? You had wanted desperately to be in this car until the moment you were actually in it, only now it seems like a very bad idea and you’re wondering how you could somehow call your mom at work, except it’s 9 o’clock at night. The car was previously owned by someone’s mean grandparent who died from smoking cigarettes. Guess what! Everyone needs you to give them money for gas, right now.

I would not buy this candle.

PABLO

From the Goest website:

Notes: Amaretto liqueur, oil paints, fresh plaster.

Aspects: Mediterranean, industrial, relaxed.

Me:

Everything was going so well at first. I was transported to a blissful childhood memory in my grandmother’s art studio, sunlight pouring through the dirty window, the comforting scent of turpentine and iced tea, my legs swinging aimlessly from the tall stool. Then the jasmine swept me away to a night freshman year of college where I had to force myself to stop crying long enough so I could finish vomiting on the tile bathroom floor of the girls’ dorm.

I would not buy this candle.

PHARMACY

From the Goest website:

Notes: Hinoki Cypress Wood, Herb, Floor Wax.

Aspects: Therapeutic, Cleansing, Groovy.

Me:

Herb? Singular? Just one herb? Which herb? Whoever he is, the hinoki wood and floor wax stole all his lines. The way your school would smell the first day they opened it back up after summer, or a quiet museum bathroom on a dusty floor that no one visits. A landforms diorama long abandoned at the back of the social studies teacher’s closet. Waiting on your dad in the hardware store, but back in the 80s, before they sold candy and soda at the register, so all you could entertain yourself with was collecting paint samples.

I would not buy this candle.

KURONEKO SAMA

From the Goest website:

Notes: Incense, Agarwood Resin, Maple Sap, Nighttime Dew.

Aspects: Mischievous, Smoky, Sweet, Dark, Complex.

Me:

The boy you’ve been secretly in love with all year unexpectedly leaves a package on your doorstep. It’s an old cigar box full of tiny treasures, like a feather and a penny in a bottle and some torn parchment where he’s drawn a yin-yang with a calligraphy pen, and nestled in the center is a handmade necklace of seven beads on a leather string from the hippie bead shop downtown. You will wear the necklace to school every day for the rest of the year but neither of you will ever discuss this transaction. This is what the inside of the cigar box still smells like twenty years later when you find it in the closet of your childhood bedroom.

I still would not buy this candle.

GALAXIE

From the Goest website:

Notes: Rockrose resin, Honey, Sage.

Aspects: Cosmic, Sweet, Strange.

Me:

Huffing the eraser shaped like an ice cream cone that you keep on your desktop all of second grade but never use so you don’t ruin it. Vibrations of the hot night air on your best friend’s driveway after her dad lit an entire can of firework snakes. Inhaling the binding of the red leather hymnal at your grandma’s Baptist church. Meticulously selecting the best tiny rock souvenir in the Cosmic Caverns gift shop. Your aunt pours some Dr. Thunder in a plastic cup during a family beach vacation and clicks her long nails against the side. Rollerskating so fast that sparks fly onto the sidewalk and you fall and skin your knees.

I will probably buy this candle.