There is no mail delivery to my building for 3 weeks now, so you can imagine my delight when I went to the main post office yesterday to pick up the mail (usually there are only bills there) - and found out that two packages I was long expecting finally arrived and I was able to pick and unpack both on the same day.

One packages was from Gabriel's Aunt in Seattle, containing a new batch of White Potion candles as well as several of her candles that I was dying to try for quite some time*. Nikki is so talented with her candle ideas, it's only a matter of time for her to be discovered and considered the big name in natural home-fragrance. Her candles don't only smell great from their tin or jar, they smell great when they burn. Whoever told you that you can't make a naturally scented candle that has a throw or smell interesting simply don't know what they are doing.

Well, Nikki surely knows how to make a candle work without the aid of any aromachemicals or pre-blended candle fragrances that come from a cookie-cutter fragrance factroy. Her scent ideas are fun and original, and her candles burn clean and steady for hours and hours on end, releasing the unique aroma that was given to them before they were poured and moulded. It's so different to smell the real essences in a candle as opposed to an imitation of everyday olfactory pleasures. In Nikki's candles, when you smell chocolate, you know it came from a real cacao bean, and you can really feel that difference. There is a reason why I chose to work with her on my own candle collection, and the results are nothing short of stunning.

I alway check to see what's new at Garbriel's Aunt, as Nikki always manages to surprise with her Just For Fun candle collection. I was particularly eager to try her Lemon Bar scent. I love lemon pastries so much it's a mystery I don't ever wear lemony scents. I find these scents fun to smell as body care or home fragrance but become easily bored with them as a personal perfume. Just a couple of weeks I made a coconut-lime scent that although I liked very much, I thought would be better as a body oil than an acutal perfume (at least for me personally).

With essential oils of lemon, lime and butter CO2, I knew Lemon Bar candle will smell heavenly. And it does. It smells exactly like how my entire house smells like when I bake lemon-lime wafers, and the scorched butter and sugar take over the space and carry along the citrusy zest of lemon and lime. A particularly fun candle to burn in the summer, when baking is out of the question but you want to be in a cloud of lime zest. The butter, I find, adds an almost coconutty nuance, which could be just my own association, but nevertheless makes the candle feel a little tropical.

* I will tell you about the contents of the other package on Monday.