Candle Reviews

This is a space for me to review candles. I bought some candles and wax melts from Magic Candle Company, the company that makes candles that are supposed to smell like places and things at Disney parks and resorts. They're headquarted in Orlando but they are not actually affilated with Disney, so their official descriptions have to be cagey about what they're trying to recreate, but they make it clear enough. By the way, I am not affliated with or paid by or in any way connected to Magic Candle Company, except as a customer!!

♥ First, I got a large Churro candle. It's tannish brownish in color, not unlike a churro. I burned it for a good while and I pretty much love it. I always appreciate a good strong cinnamon scent. I really like the churros at Disneyland, but I'm not sure that the candle is particularly reminiscent ("scent" hehe) of the food item. The candle is a yummy, cinnamonny, vaguely churroesque olfactory offering and a good start as the first candle I sniffed. 5/5

♥ Nextly, we have a large Poison Apple candle, which promised from the description to be a crisply appley autumnal type of scent. The wax is pinkish red in color. I don't know if it's supposed to smell like any part of a Snow White ride at a Disney park or just represent the poisoned apple that the Evil Queen gives Snow White in Disney's hit movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Since it is currently the month of April as I write this, I have not burned it yet. But I sniffed it and I was not disappointed. I think it will be a good fall vibes candle for when it's fall. I will update if I burn it and it puts me into a death sleep from which only the kiss of a prince I met one time can awake me, like in the film. Haven't Burned It/5

♥ Tertiarily, I got a small candle of the variety called Little Old Christmas Shop. It's a very similar color to Poison Apple despite smelling quite different. I was going to buy a candle warmer from MCC (Magic Candle Company) to make the order cost enough for free shipping, but it seemed overpriced so I got a cheap candle warmer elsewhere and got this as an extra candle from MCC. The kind of candle warmer I got is a doohickey that you plug in and it heats up this pad that's basically like a big electric coaster. It's even marketed as also being a coffee cup warmer but I tried it and it's not hot enough for that in my opinion. I'll keep reheating my coffee in the microwave. Anyway, the warmer heats up a candle and melts the wax from the bottom up so that you can get the smells from the candle without lighting it. Why? Well, I had a candle that the wick got totally fricked up and basically became useless and this device allowed me to still wring those scents from it. And sometimes even a candle burning normally will run out of wick when there's still a bunch of meltable wax left. But the main reason for the warmer was to melt the wax melts I got from MCC, which are like soft candle pieces without wicks, specifically designed to be heated up and melted, and I'm doing that with the warmer and putting them in empty candle...containers? Ya know, the little glass that's left over when you burn a candle and there's no more candle left, it's just the outside part. I have a few of those collected now and I'm putting the wax melts in there to use them. I don't know why I went on so long about the warmer. But the Christmas candle smelled really good and super Christmassy. Similar to the one above, it's a seasonal deal that I plan to burn once the corresponding season comes around. Haven't Burned It/5

♥ Quaternarily, we have the wax melts. I got their pre-packaged set of their Top 10 Wax Melts, the top ten bestselling ones or most popular or whatever. The wax melts are a lot bigger than I expected from the website pictures so that was a nice surprise. Each one is a circle with five segments, a center one and four on the outside. The diameter of the circles is just over three inches. The website says that each one weighs 3.75oz but I'm bad at imagining the size of things. Let's take them in the order MCC arranges them.

Magic Candle Company Top Ten Wax Melts

  1. Pirate Life. Color: Light blue. This is their most popular candle or like their flagship one or whatever. It was actually the flavor I was most looking forward to. It's supposed to smell like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. Like the beginning part, I think, or like the first big room with the sea battle. The ride is fantastic of course and it smells really unique and pleasant in there. This wax melt unfortunately did not recreate that for me. It smells like soap and pierces the nostrils most unpleasantly. A disappointment, to be sure, but a risk I was willing to take considering I was buying a bunch of scented things online without ever smelling them myself first. I hated it. 1/5
  2. Polynesian. Color: Light green. Disney connection: I think it's supposed to evoke some Disney hotel somewhere called like The Polynesian that I've never been to. I liked this one! I find it to be piney, although the description doesn't mention pine. It's a nice tropical blend that smells like plants. A botanical experience. 4/5
  3. Haunted. Color: Deep purple. Supposed to smell like the Haunted Mansion, the great classic dark ride that opened at Disneyland in 1969. It kinda does smell like the Haunted Mansion, good job! It's kind of musty and somehow spooky and also smells kind of like whiskey? The scariest of all liquors. Sets a darker, more serious atmosphere than most of the others. 4/5!
  4. Banshee Flight. Color: Light blue. I think there's some ride or Halloween experience that is called something similar to the name of the scent. It would be a tall order to make a smell that was "scary," but I find the name Banshee Flight to be quite evocative and spooky. The scent itself is pretty good, floral and a little soapy again. Not scary at all. 3/5
  5. Flying Over Orange Groves. Color: Light orange. This is meant to evoke a part in the ride Soarin' Over California and/or Soarin' Around the World where you start soarin' over some orange groves and I think they pipe some scent into the ride for some extra experiential Disney magic. I'm normal about Disney, I swear. This scent is another one that was hotly anticipated by me. It can be hard to put a good citrus aroma on wax. The smell is really orangey and almost equally soapy. Not at all bad, though. 3/5
  6. Pineapple Whip. Hoo, boy. This light yellow wax melt is modeled after the delicious pineapple-flavored ice cream confection known as the Dole Whip, available for purchase at Disneyland outside the Tiki Room attraction. Named, of course, after the Dole family that colonized an entire Hawaiian island to turn it into an enormous pineapple plantation and also helped the US illegally annex the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. Of all the ones I got, this is the scent that is the most accurate to the Disney thing it’s recreating. It smells just like a Dole Whip tastes: piquant pineapple and ice cream, sometimes teeth-hurtingly sweet. 4/5
  7. Contemporary. Light magenta. Supposed to smell like the Contemporary Resort, a hideous, modernist, almost soft brutalist building at Disney World. I’m sure it smells fine in there. This melt, not so much. More like “contempt-orary”! It smells similar to the awful Pirate Life scent, but more floral. In fact, I decided to put those two on the warmer at once to melt them together, figuring the pale purple result couldn’t be any worse than either of them alone. The combo is pretty good! Kind of a galaxy-brained move on my part, I have to say. The soapiness of both kind of cancels each other out, leaving some benign floral notes struggling to get through. Contemporary: 1/5.....Pirate Life/Contemporary combo: 3/5
  8. Splash. This light blue melt is of course based on the log flume ride Splash Mountain, which was my favorite ride at Disneyland. It's insane that in the 1980s, Disney decided to theme a ride after the movie Song of the South, which has never been released on home video in the US because of the controversy—which has existed since the movie was released in the '40s—around its depiction of post-Civil War Black sharecroppers as whimsical, happy-go-lucky raconteurs. More recently, the ride has sensibly been transformed into a Princess and the Frog-themed attraction. I've never ridden Tiana's Bayou Adventure, but I bet it would still be my favorite ride at the park, since it was never the racism that made me enjoy it so much. It's the visceral, stomach-dropping thrill of that final big drop, where you feel like you're hurtling 90 degrees straight downward. I like that I can't chicken out: I'm already on the ride and I gotta go down. Anyway, this scent is not terrible. It's soapy in a much less assaultive way than Pirate Life and Contemporary. It actually does smell a little like Splash Mountain did. As far as the scents I purchased whose Disney park counterparts I'm familiar with, this is a distant third best recreation of the real thing after Pineapple Whip and Haunted. The description on the Splash packaging promises "notes of damp air and musty bromine water." Fortunately it smells slightly better than that sounds. 2/5
  9. Wilderness Resort. Light brown. The packaging of this one reminds me of the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail and the Grand Californian Hotel behind it. Not that I've ever taken time out of a day at Disneyland Resort to go on a hike, but I've walked by there on the way to or from the Grizzly River Run rapids ride. Maybe the scent is supposed to be something else, some wilderness-themed hotel at WDW. The melt kind of smells outdoorsy, woody, and like camping. Not my favorite, but maybe my ninth favorite. 3/5
  10. Tiki Terrace. Yellowy orange. The packaging and name suggest the waiting area between Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room and the Dole Whip stand, near the entrance to Adventureland. A pungent, creamy, vaguely tropical smell that puts one in mind of racist educational talking tiki figures. 3/5

To be continued, friends!!!!!

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