Which sense would you be most willing to give up? I've found this to be an easy question for most people to answer. Art, natural beauty, and orientation incline us to favor sight. Music and speech work in the same way--one enhances our lives while the other enables it.*
Our desire for touch is similar but less easy to hierarchize. The international cuisine movement has appreciated a lot of people's consideration of taste, but at the same time the drive for culinary diversity is also rooted in a bodily health context--the foods that taste best are increasingly becoming those that we perceive as 'good for us'. Products like Soylent take this to and aesthetic/functional peak, where food is reduced to sustenance.
*It is interesting how this preference of sight over sound is reflected in the telephone. I spent several hours interacting (to different degrees of personability) with people on my phone, but less than one minute of that time was spoken/heard.
The well known relationship with food and sense leads us to the olfactory realm. The final drama of Ratatouille has always struck me as a relatable and profound explanation of this--the skeptical, bourgeois, critic takes a bite of a peasant's dish that would be scoffed at in the gourmet restaurant he is reviewing. His first bite is tentative, but it immediately transports him back to his childhood, walking into his home, slightly upset, to find his mother preparing a dish of ratatouille. The food is still cooking so he is only able to take a deep smell of the room (family, food, youth, familiarity, security). It is much more about the reminiscence of smells than of taste; the food provides sustenance but his memory is of the scent. Returning to the present, he and the other patrons around are all overdramatically (Disney), childishly devouring their respective dishes. Their faces all show that their experiences are just as rooted in an intimate memory. Even as a teenager, this scene resonated with me enough (I have not re-watched Ratatouille) to remember and to relish (initially) and excavate (retroactively) them and what they convey about my own past.
The earliest definitive textual documentation of candles dates to around 500 BC, when Greeks began to surround their wicks with tallow (rendered beef or mutton fat). Solidified candle wax was much easier to transport than the previous liquid oil lamps, which were prone to spillage. Across the world, different processes emerged at similar times: Chinese royalty initially used whale fat before moving to the staple of beeswax, Japanese used wax from different tree nuts, and southern Asia used a residue from boiled cinnamon in their places of worship. Their utility* seems more pertinent than their various odors, thought it is not difficult to imagine, especially in the south asian example, that a sort of associational memory was not at all present.
*Candles were of course used as light sources, but also even as measurers of time
Candle-making became a guild craft in France and England in the 13th century. Guilds--ordained organizations of craftsmen that unified standards of production--served as a sort of (elitist) proto-labor union. Artisans would pay for their membership in the guild, in return they would gain access to trade secrets, their products would be legitimized, and they might even get a home. These candles were all tallow-based, a wax that's production and incineration was unpleasant to the point of being banned in certain European cities. The sperm whaling industry blossomed in response to the discovery of spermaceti, a relatively odorless (when burned) substance that is stored above sperm whales' notoriously elongated heads*, and used to facilitate their communicative echolocation. The commercial whaling industry was officially banned in 1986 by an international coalition, but spermaceti use had long been diminished (though it remained in high demand as a luxury substance) by two factors: the synthesis of petroleum based parrafin wax in 1854, and the invention of an industrial, centrifugal candle maker that could produce thousands of candles per hour. The inventor of parrafin also became adept at reducing a more diverse group of materials (bone, skin, mechanical grease) into wax that could be used as candles, and the industry enjoyed a brief period of widespread affordability and availability. Candles were, however, relegated to a primarily ornamental status soon thereafter, as kerosene lamps, and finally incandescent lightbulbs, were introduced and widely accepted.
*A guilded candle-maker (chandler) would often reside in large English households, making candles from the leftover fats of foods prepared by the cooks in residence.
** In Moby Dick, a man almost drowns after falling into a whale's head that has been opened for harvesting. The whale's casing can hold up to 1900 litres of spermaceti.
The history of candle-making and the relation between smells and our personal histories becomes relevant at this point. A long history of aromatic classification and aestheticization, as well as an increasingly global supply chain, has enabled the crafting of a seemingly endless knowledge of variously scented materials.
Peppermint Grove Australia employs these possibilities to their fullest. A collection of city-themed (Milan, London, Madrid, Shanghai, New York, Berlin) candles and reed diffusers might inspire a time and/or space journey through a recollection of our experiences in any of these places. The variety of ingredients, constructed as a balanced set of high, medium, and low notes, gives room to a wide variety of associations, many of which are intelligible even without having visited the places after which they are crafted.
Complementing this line of fragrances is a much more extensive Australian collection. Black orchid and ginger evoke the northern wetlands, and a burnt fig and pear combination hearken all the way to the Margaret River Region, south of Perth. The variety in this collection emphasises the vastness of Australian flora, and can certainly unearth our own personal connections with these scents and places. The candles are hand-made from soy wax, which burns much cleaner and longer than paraffin-based candles. The slower burn allows the complex blend of aromas to gradually fill the environment, moving from high to low notes as it moves you across your own notes.