Top 10 Yankee Candle Fragrance Recipes for Valentine's Day

Want to set the right mood for Valentine's Day? Create your own custom fragrance with Yankee Candle Fragrance Mixology. Light 2 or 3 Samplers® votive candles in different scents or break apart a few different Tarts® wax potpourri and blend them. The unique fragrance will take on a personality of its own! Here are the Top 10 mixes for romance this Valentine's Day:

1. Sunny Afternoon = Sweet Honeysuckle™ + Soft Blanket™ + Early Sunrise™
2. Cupid's Arrow = Midnight Oasis™ + Drift Away™
3. Cheek to Cheek = Pink Lady Slipper + MidSummer's Night®
4. Sensual Spa = Pink Lady Slipper + Eucalyptus + Honeydew Melon
5. Seduction = Sun & Sand™ + MidSummer's Night®
6. Boyfriend's Shirt = Soft Blanket™ + Mountain Lake®
7. Weekend Getaway = Soft Blanket™ + Cottage Breeze®
8. Midnight Rendezvous = Midnight Oasis™ + MidSummer's Night®
9. Breakfast in Bed = Maple Pancakes + Strawberry Buttercream + Sweet Strawberry
10. Honeymoon = Pink Sands™ + Wedding Day™

Top 10 Last Minute Gifts for Fragrance Fanatics

Are you looking for quick and easy ways to finish your holiday shopping? Here is my list of the Top 10 Last Minute "Guaranteed To Be Loved" gifts for fragrance fanatics:

1. A Festive Yankee Candle® jar candle - Whether you are looking for something that smells like a freshly cut Christmas Tree, the magic of the North Pole™, or like you've been baking Christmas Cookies™ all day, Yankee Candle has that "smells just like the holidays" scent!
2. New 2011 Yankee Candle® jar candle - Searching for something someone can use long after the decorations are put away? Pick up one of the new 2011 scents like Fluffy Towels™, Bahama Breeze or Orange Dreamsicle!
3. Yankee Candle® gift set - No time to wrap? Yankee Candle has gift sets in every price point!
4. Candle accessories - For the best-dressed candles in town, choose candle accessories in glass, ceramic, or metal!
5. Fragranced reed diffusers - Know someone who can't light a candle? Yankee Candle fragranced reed diffusers are the perfect flame-free solution!
6. Tarts® wax potpourri - Want something truly unique? Select Tarts® in several different scents so that the recipient can create their own custom mix!
7. Bayberry Tapers - New Year's Eve tradition says that "Burning a bayberry candle from tip to socket puts luck in the home and gold in the pocket"!
8. Candle tools - For the true candle connoisseur, put together a package of useful tools like wick snips, candle snuffers, and a butane candle lighter.
9. Samplers® votive candles - No fragrance lover's stocking is completely filled until there is a votive candle in the toe!
10. Scented Gift Card - When all else fails, let them choose their own gift with a scented Yankee Candle gift card in any denomination!

Yankee Candle Fragrance Mixology

Like the best celebrity chefs, Yankee Candle fans love to mix their own recipes. They may take a little fruit, add some spice, and perhaps a touch of sweetness and voila! They get a scent unlike any other - their own custom home fragrance. At Yankee Candle we call it Fragrance Mixology, but you can call it the finishing touch that makes an ordinary event extraordinary!

To create your custom scent, think of it in terms of taste - what flavors go well together? If you have a little sour, you probably need a little sweet to balance it. The headiness of a floral might be tempered nicely by a fresh scent. Once you've thought about what might make a nice blend, it's time to shop for the fragrances! Narrow down your choice to 2 or 3 scents that sound like they’ll go well together and you can have fun experimenting. If you use Tarts® wax potpourri, you can break them into pieces and add a little of each into the bowl of the warmer until you get the aroma that you like. (Be careful not to add too many pieces, you don’t want melted wax to drip out of the warmer!) If you use Samplers® votive candles, you can either use several holders throughout your entertaining space or you can buy a unique clover shaped holder at www.yankeecandle.com that will allow you to burn 3 votives together. Once you're a master mixologist, you could even try blending scents with non-candle forms such as warming oils, or even using a candle in one fragrance and a reed in another. The scents will mix as they waft through the air.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Spiced Orange + Cranberry Chutney + Vineyard® = Autumn Harvest
• Creamy Caramel + Buttercream® + Fireside™ = Campfire Marshmallow
• Patchouli + Spiced Pumpkin = Witches' Parlor

You can see that the possibilities are endless – truly limited only by your own imagination. Have fun and let me know what custom scent you create!

How to Create Your Own Custom Yankee Candle® Scent

A favorite activity among candle fans is creating their own custom blend with Tarts® wax potpourri. Dubbed Fragrance Mixology™ by the Yankee Candle Company, this kind of DIY home fragrance is two parts art and one part science. It's sort of Iron Chef meets Bill Nye the Science Guy! For the artistic part, mixologists need to know which fragrances would make a great blend. Would you try mixing Coconut Bay™ and Midsummer's Night®? What about Honeydew Melon and Storm Watch®? Just as different foods will bring out different tastes when combined, different scents will also bring out the best (or the worst) in each other. Once you decide on the combo, you need to determine how much of each fragrance to combine. That's the science part. Do you make each part equal, or would you rather have more of one scent shine through? Through trial and error, mixologists will come up with just the right recipe and then don their artistic cap again to craft the perfect - and perfectly clever - name for their creation.

Fragrance mixologist extraordinaire Leigh Silas Hanrihan catalogued all of the recipes tried in the test kitchens of Yankee Candle® fans around the world and posted them on this website:

http://candlemixarchive.weebly.com/ .

The next time you want to provide just the right fragrance for your home, have fun developing your own custom blend!

SET THE MOOD WITH A CUSTOM SCENT!

Want to know a secret to the success of all those red carpet events and lavish Hollywood parties? Celebrity party planners create the mood with custom scents developed especially for the occasion. The real secret is that you can do the same thing in your own home just by blending different candle scents.

At Yankee Candle we call it Fragrance Mixology, but you can call it the finishing touch that makes an ordinary event extraordinary!

To create your custom scent, you’ll first need to think about the theme for your occasion and then shop for fragrances that reinforce that theme. Once you’ve narrowed down your choice to 2 or 3 scents that sound like they’ll go well together you can have fun experimenting. If you use Tarts® wax potpourri, you can break them into pieces and add a little of each into the bowl of the warmer until you get the aroma that you like. (Be careful not to add too many pieces, you don’t want melted wax to drip out of the warmer!) If you use Samplers® votive candles, you can either use several holders throughout your entertaining space or you can buy a unique clover shaped holder at http://www.yankeecandle.com/ that will allow you to burn 3 votives together. You could even try blending scents with non-candle forms such as using a candle in one fragrance and an electric plug-in in another. The scents will mix as they waft through the air.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• For a Girl's Night, try an Appletini: Pineapple Cilantro + MacIntosh
• For a Baby Shower, try the scent of a New Born: Tahitian Tiare Flower + Baby Powder
• For a Sunday Brunch, try Wake Me Up: Café Au Lait + Cinnamon & Sugar + Hazelnut Coffee
  

You can see that the possibilities are endless – truly limited only by your own imagination. Have fun and let me know what custom scent you create!