The Story Behind My Pine Scented Candle

 I never set out to start a candle business. I just wanted a candle that smelled like a forest.

For a long time, that turned out to be harder to find than it should have been. Every "pine" candle I picked up smelled less like standing under a tree and more like something you'd use to mop a floor — sharp, chemical, the kind of scent that announces itself instead of settling into a room. I kept buying them anyway, hoping the next one would be different. It never was.

At some point, frustration turned into curiosity. If nobody was making the candle I wanted, maybe I could figure out how to make it myself. So I did — slowly, and with a fair amount of trial and error. Wax that seized up wrong. Wicks that drowned themselves. Fragrance blends that smelled more like air freshener than forest. I kept at it anyway, batch after batch, in an apartment that started smelling like a lot of things before it finally smelled like the one thing I was after.

When I finally got it right — a scent that actually captured standing in the pines, not walking past a cleaning supply aisle — I realized I probably wasn't the only person who'd been let down by fake pine. That hunch turned out to be right. In 2018, what had been a stubborn hobby taking over my apartment became Tall Pine Candles.

Every candle since has started the same way: hand-poured, right here in Flagstaff, with 100% soy wax and cotton wicks — nothing complicated, nothing that needs to hide behind a long ingredient list. Just the smell I spent years chasing, now sitting on a shelf instead of just in my head.

If you've ever wondered why "Tall Pines" is the fragrance this whole business is named after — now you know. It's not just a candle. It's the one that started it all.

Bob Evans

Head Wick Trimmer

www.tallpinecandles.com