Style-signifying scents are big business today. You can take the temperature of a new London restaurant by the soap it offers in the bathroom (Aesop is top tier), while the Big Fashion candle is the new Big Fashion cologne, with everyone from Gucci to Loewe launching home fragrance lines. In the niche corner, silly blends reign supreme – if you're so inclined, you can now perfume your living room with the scent of pasta, cannabis, or wet concrete.
As new brands pile into the home-fragrance scrum, true heritage feels rare – and no-one has a backstory as rich in history as Trudon.
If the brand first came to you via a well-curated Instagram grid, congrats on being under 30 - but those gold-crested glass vessels actually far precede the era of social-media showing off. As the oldest candlemaker still in operation worldwide, the heft of Trudon’s heritage is what makes it such an alluring brand today.
According to creative director Julien Provost, the key is the seamless fusion of old and new. “Trudon combines a constantly evolving centuries-old craft with modern shapes and scents that pay tribute to its glorious past,” he says, describing the art as an “alchemy between tradition and non-conformity”.
This month, the brand is celebrating its 380th Anniversary with a new, permanent collection. An ode to French history, the Tuileries collection is inspired by the palace where Marie Antoinette and King Louis XIV fled amidst the French Revolution in 1789, remaining until 1792 (after which, well, we know what happened).
While the mainstream fragrance industry likes to hinge new launches on a particular single note to enable easy purchasing – most people know what, say, jasmine, or oud smells like – each Trudon scent tells a more complex story. The tale of Tuileries starts with Marie Antoinette’s favourite flower, rose. This classic flower hasn’t always enjoyed the best rep – get it wrong, and the result can be cloyingly soapy – but we’re far from that territory here. Trudon’s bouquet is complex and multifaceted, with identifiable patchouli for grounding earthiness and a twist of raspberry that makes the whole thing feel right for lighting on spring evenings. And of course, there’s a lingering hint of vanilla in homage to the most famous misquote in history.
This isn’t the first time Trudon have drawn on their rich backstory – and one can hardly blame them, when it’s the kind of poetic romance most marketing teams would kill for. In 1643, Claude Trudon arrived in Paris and soon opened a store on Rue Saint-Honore, providing then-essential candles for lighting the home. When the family purchased France’s most esteemed wax factory in 1737, its candles became a staple in churches, cathedrals, and the home of King Louis XVI.
While the King and his Queen may not have survived the French Revolution with their heads intact, the brand did – and today, the tales that followed are fuelling a lasting resurgence.
