Wax Poetic: A Candle Story
I started hanging out at The Edition Hotel during a peculiar and chaotic phase of my life in New York. I was 26 and not in a financial position to spend $22 for a hotel bar cocktail that came garnished with raspberries speared by a unicorn toothpick. And yet! Posted up in the lobby of The Edition, that’s precisely what I got into the habit of doing. This was around the time I gave up on the idea of having a savings account—convinced there was no such thing as a twenty-something New Yorker with both money to spare and a compelling roster of misadventures that bred stories worth telling.
At the time, my office was located on a strange stretch of Broadway that was in the process of being rebranded as “NoMad.” But surrounded by abandoned furriers, wholesaler drug fronts, and ephemeral alt-milk coffee shops that closed before I could fill a punch card, I always lovingly referred to it as “the last slice of Mayor Lindsay’s New York.” The longer I worked in Mayor Lindsay’s New York, the more post-work (or mid-work—I work at an agency, you’ve seen Mad Men) libation-laden activities began to unfurl for me. A bourbon smash and a parker house roll at The Ace Hotel’s John Dory Oyster Bar. A martini with four olives and $18 worth of tiny purple carrots billed as crudité at The Nomad Hotel’s Library Bar. And, of course, just a few blocks up near Madison Square Park, the allure of The Edition awaited me.
If I was drawn to The Edition by the prospect of Instagramming an aesthetically pleasing drink, so be it, but that’s not what kept me going back. The moment I walked into the hotel’s lobby I was struck by its intoxicating scent. Floral yet earthy. Kissed, perhaps, by a wisp of citrus. Heavy and light at the same time.
It reminded me of something unnameable and unfindable—a memory I had of Paris at 19 years old, departing the piss stench of the metro at its Porte de Clignancourt terminus and stepping into the bustling, sweet, thickly-perfumed air that surrounded the crowd of upscale flea market attendees. The amalgamation of fragrance made it impossible to identify exactly what stood out to me, and the memory was buried as an essence, something too ethereal to hold or properly recall. I spent years chasing that essence. I wore Chloé perfume throughout my early twenties believing it had scratched the surface of the vibe I was coveting. But when I walked into The Edition, I was immersed in the Paris memory’s closest match.
The scent, it quickly became apparent, was coming from everywhere. The candles tucked into corners around low profile seating. The hand soap in the bathroom. It seemed to be diffused in the air, possibly streaming out of the vents. After several unicorn cocktails, I marched my drunk ass to the concierge and demanded to know what that smell was. The woman at the desk gave me a knowing, smug little smile as she explained it was The Edition’s signature scent, one they had created in collaboration at LeLabo. A symphony of black tea, vetiver, cedar wood, bergamot, and “musks.”
LeLabo was—at the time of The Edition’s inception, at least—considered by Ian Schrager to be “the best perfumers in the world” (according to an anecdote shared by the brand’s cofounder, Fabrice Pinot). Part of what inherently compels me about The Edition Hotel is that Ian Schrager is the mastermind behind the enterprise. Half the duo that launched Studio 54, Schrager is largely credited with incepting the concept of the boutique hotel and considered an entrepreneurial genius—albeit one with notable experience in public pratfalls. And because I cling to a fleeting but deep suspicion that I hung out at Studio 54 in my last life, I’m apt to follow his contemporary vision and masterful curation wherever it may take me. By upping the ante on scent branding with his LeLabo partnership, he inadvertently ushered me into a micro-era of sensory euphoria. I narrowed my eyes as I sipped on yet another unicorn cocktail that brought me closer to having my credit card denied, surveyed my glowy surroundings and thought: my life could be perfect if only I smelled like that candle.
What happened next is obvious: I went to the Edition bathroom, emptied the bottle that held my Ativan prescription into my purse, and began pumping the scented hand soap into the tiny vessel while watching myself, dead-eyed in the mirror, like a psychotic bootlegger. Only the next morning with my head on fire and loose benzos scattered around my purse did I remember what I’d done. Was I mortified? Mildly. But more importantly, I had a small sample of the smell I’d been chasing around my dreams for nearly a decade to huff at my own leisure.
The Edition scent is not available as a personal fragrance, and LeLabo makes it exclusively for the hotel. But one scent on their regular roster comes close: Thé Noir, the Edition-adjacent black tea fragrance that comes in many different forms. I started wearing it as a liquid balm on my 27th birthday and have worn it every day since. At some point, The Edition began selling its scent as an $80 candle (they also sell iterations of it as bath products, diffusing reeds, and—lo and behold!—a mechanic diffuser that mimics the hotel’s HVAC pump mechanism on a small scale). I only recently pulled the trigger on buying this candle after burning through my roster of fancy candles amidst a long pandemic-induced year indoors. It admittedly can be overwhelming when lit in a small space, but its mere presence feels like a treasure. It makes me wistfully remember a barely bygone chapter of my life and it makes me yearn for Mayor Lindsay’s New York.
A couple of years ago on a work trip to London, I capped a long evening of upscale bar hopping with my boss at a plush + palatial hotel lobby bar—sipping a kir royale in the dim light, surrounded by statement chandeliers and salon-style art. Despite the jetlag and the ceaseless drinking (so it goes with spirits clients), I felt uncharacteristically comfortable. A perfect place of peaceful stasis. Why was I so at home? We were drinking at The Edition. The universal scent—so closely matched to my own perfume—permeated the air through the vents, the candles, everything. I didn’t want to leave; it smelled just like me.
