THEIR FUNCTIONS may be similar, but the difference between a candle and a perfume can be narrowed down to their specific jobs: one is an aroma that permeates. The other is a scent that intimates. One is public, the other is personal. 

The French house of Trudon recently decided to bridge this gap and transform difference into a creative brief: recreate their global best-selling candle, Ernesto, into a wearable fragrance. Many would be familiar with its notes of tobacco and leather that simmer below citrus accords and how it lingers in the room. But how to translate this into something that could be applied to the skin?

It was, says Trudon’s new Creative Director Hugo Ferroux, a challenge he was more than willing to accept. “So many [people had asked for a wearable Ernesto] that it is the first project that was brought to my attention when I arrived at Trudon,” he tells Esquire.

Trudon Creative Director, Hugo Ferroux

What Ferroux wanted from the resulting fragrance, called Carmen, wasn’t a faithful copy. Asked what he hoped it would add to Ernesto’s world rather than simply translate onto skin, his answer was direct: “Sexiness and magnetism.” But he wasn’t interested in drifting far from the source either. 

“It’s very close to the original but intentionally so,” he explains. “The demand from Ernesto’s fan base was loud and clear, moving too far away from its iconic character would have felt out of place.” 

Reconciling fidelity to Ernesto with the different chemistry of wearing a scent rather than burning one fell to perfumer Émilie Bouge, the same nose behind the original candle. There’s a symmetry between the two, but clear distinctions. Ernesto’s presence always opens and lingers with a tantalising grapefruit and bergamot top note. In Carmen, the leather and tobacco are pushed further forward for something more sensual from the very start, rather than the dry down. “We chose to push the leather note a little further, bringing an added layer of sensuality to the composition,” Ferroux explains. 

But what to name it? Much of Trudon’s creative universe can be traced to three recurring themes: religion, royalty and revolution. Ernesto fell into the latter category, named after the revolutionary Che Guevara. But as a perfume, emanating from the skin, it became multifaceted. The operatic character of Carmen, a revolutionary in her own right but also a force of passion and romance, became the clear choice. Bizet’s tobacco-factory heroine, rolling leaves against her bare thigh, suited the brief precisely. “Since the candle carries a man’s name, it felt only right for the perfume to bear a woman’s name,” says Ferroux. “Ultimately, it is a shared, unisex note: a dialogue between masculine and feminine, strength and sensuality.”

Since his arrival, Ferroux has also released a candle that has already become a canonical icon of the house. Figuerie, Ferroux’s debut candle, ventures toward the garden, borrowing its name and its history from the Figuerie at Versailles, the greenhouse Louis XIV commissioned so he might eat fresh figs out of season, translated into something green, woody, and only lightly sweetened by the fruit itself.

Ferroux wanted the scent to hold two temperatures at once, the cold stone of a winter greenhouse and the first warm light of spring hitting it. “I could picture the instant contrast between the freshness of the leaves and the humidity, earthy notes of the cave with the first light of the day coming in and lighting up the trees,” he says. The result reads mellow at a distance and considerably more seductive up close. “Like a shot of Versailles,” as Ferroux puts it, “noble, opulent and slightly provocative.”

If there was anyone that would master the intersection, or transmutation from candle to perfume and back again, it would be Trudon. The house has kept candles in continuous production since 1643, surviving a revolution that saw off most of its original aristocratic clientele and picking up a rather different one afterwards – Napoleon among them, according to Marketing Director Mathilde Corbin. What has changed under Ferroux is the vocabulary used to describe the product, not the method behind it. 

“Our candles are imagined like a perfume – we have top notes, heart notes and base notes,” says Aurélien Lefèvre, Trudon’s Global Commercial Director. “It’s not just jasmine and that’s all. We have a very rich and complex construction.” The craft itself is still taught the way it always has been, inside the family’s own factory, because there is nowhere else to learn it. “There is no school of wax,” adds Corbin. “It doesn’t exist.” What exists instead is direct transmission, one generation to the next. “We have mother and daughters in the factory, working together,” she says.

That same insistence on doing things the old way extends to what the candles are made from. Trudon doesn’t keep hives of its own, but it finances a bee conservatory dedicated to protecting the European honeybee specifically – slower and less productive than its Asian counterparts, but built to survive a European winter rather than need replacing after one. 

“She prepares for winter and she regroups, and then the next summer she’s there again,” says Corbin. Asian bees produce more honey, which is why commercial beekeepers tend to prefer them, but they die off in the cold, meaning the hives have to be restocked every year rather than protected. It’s a level of commitment to sustainability that proves how much they value not just their craft but the materials and world that allows them to create. “Bees are the DNA of the brand,” says Corbin. “In the beginning, 400 years ago, the candles were made out of 100 per cent beeswax. So it’s really our DNA.”

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