Some time ago, deep in the eerie quiet of 2020, my partner, daughter, and I moved from our creaky Brooklyn apartment to a Craftsman-style house in Los Angeles, my hometown. But while my body was physically in place, enjoying the 300 days of sunshine and waking up to swaying palm trees, my mind took a bit longer to arrive.
The regular worries of pandemic life had imbued a sense of frenzied urgency into my already-anxious core—a complete contrast to the laid-back lifestyle surrounding me in my new locale. Very quickly into my return to the West Coast, I realized that if ever there was a time to truly invest in self-care, it was now.
This was partly because, like many pandemic decisions, our move had been slightly spontaneous and wholly unorganized, with a hastily signed lease just one week before move-in. Watching the movers open up the truck to reveal our jumbled wares—several years’ worth of vintage furniture, boxes upon boxes of books, and Tetrised-in dining chairs—was an apt metaphor for our new life: Everything was a bit of a mess.
To help us cope and create a sense of place, we designated one of the extra rooms in our wood-beamed rental as a meditation room, complete with cozy blankets and floor cushions and piles of incense sticks in various trial-by-error bouquets. I tried to establish a routine in that room, but my mind would always wander after a minute or two, no matter how much I tried to shut it off.
They say scent can ground you in a place, but every kind of incense I lit hung in the air, distracting me. I decided that what I needed to help me let go in my small stuffy room was something that conjured more of what is so great about moving to California in the first place: namely, its proximity to nature, even if you live in the middle of the city (like I do).
I needed something a little more calming and a lot more exuberant, and I found it in the strangely pungent yet freshly scented Flamingo Estate Adriatic Muscatel Sage candle.
Staff pick
Delightfully herbaceous, with a crisp briny undertone, this luxe candle brings you closer to nature.
My introduction to Flamingo Estate—a Los Angeles–based lifestyle company with its own line of decor, food, and personal-care products—happened gradually, as is the case with many savvily marketed brands.
First, at a professional mixer, I found a small glass container of rosemary-scented bath salts in a gift bag, complete with a handwritten label. Then, a Flamingo Estate–branded CSA box—an offering available online if you live in LA—landed on my kitchen counter after a friend was house-sitting one summer.
By the time a thick catalog-turned-lifestyle magazine appeared in my mail touting the company’s local farming commitments and slow-living ethos, I was thoroughly influenced. A great holiday sale finally convinced me to try out some products, including the sage candle.
Like Flamingo Estate’s popular tomato-scented candle, a favorite in Wirecutter’s guide to scented candles, the sage candle is produced with ingredients from local farms, it comes in a calming green glass jar, and it uses a cotton wick and hand-poured vegetable wax.
Surprisingly, the sage scent smells to me almost nothing like the burning sage smudge sticks that many will recognize; instead, it’s slightly reminiscent of basil, with a delightfully herbaceous note and a crisp, briny undertone. It has many of the subtle vegetal qualities of the tomato candle, preventing it from veering into sweet or cloying territory.
Sage, of course, is of deeply meaningful importance to many people around the world, especially indigenous cultures; it’s been long valued for its medicinal, culinary, and spiritual properties, and its scent is used in ceremony in different ways.
My delight in the Flamingo Estate candle, however, lies more firmly in the mundane: Its scent conjures visions of the joyful sage bushes and swaying native grasses that are in abundance everywhere from the trails by the Hollywood sign to the front yards in my neighborhood. It smells like nature, as California intended.
That seems to be by design, considering Richard Christensen, the founder of Flamingo Estate, has taken California living to a whole new level. As brand lore will tell you, after a career in fashion in New York City, Christensen retreated into his sunset-pink mansion, tucked away in lush gardens somewhere in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. This is where he spent his days harvesting the organic ingredients that inspired his line of personal-care products and carefully crafted foods (including weekly flower deliveries and limited-edition honeys, made in collaboration with the likes of LeBron James and Ed Ruscha).
It turns out, the sage candle was his very first product and the inspiration for Flamingo Estate, he tells me when I ask him about the candle’s origin. “I was so exhausted and overwhelmed and kind of dead from working in New York for 20 years, and sage was the thing that woke me up—just fistfuls of sage that were growing here,” he says. “I feel like it’s the official scent of California.”
Maybe that’s the beauty of this candle: No matter where you live, its clear-eyed scent reminds you that nature is right there.
It isn’t perfect, of course. The thick green glass can get incredibly hot while the candle is burning, and it blackens with soot after a while. (I will admit that I’ve been lazy about candle care, even though the first time I used this one, I made sure to burn it long enough to create an even surface and prevent tunneling, which has worked so far.) These issues are common to most candles, and I have yet to find another with a scent that’s this simply grounding and exhilarating. Also, at about $60, this candle isn’t cheap. But astonishingly, mine has lasted for over two years of regular use.
It’s been four years since our arrival in LA, and my family and I have traded the Craftsman for another Californian staple: the ubiquitous Spanish colonial bungalow. The intensely violet petals of our garden’s Mexican bush sage attract a never-ending stream of hummingbirds to my office window, where they greet me whenever my eyes take a break from my computer screen.
Today, the candle sits on the mantel in my living area, and I’ve fallen into a nascent yet stereotypically Californian wellness routine that includes a fondness for the Headspace app, occasional trips to Erewhon, and expensive yet dubiously effective Moon Juice products.
When it’s time to meditate or to take a break from (over)thinking, or even just to focus on a task, I like to light my trusty Flamingo Estate candle and wait until the scent slowly permeates my surroundings, never overpowering. It’s there to help me relax, reminding me to take time and smell the sage.
This article was edited by Katie Okamoto and Maxine Builder.
