Interview with Trish Fenwick
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Böhmer on Ossington street in Toronto used to have buck-a-shuck oysters, $22 lobster and half price bottles of wine on Tuesday nights, which I made sure to enjoy as much as possible. It was close to my workplace and the perfect spot to catch up with friends. One such night I was in the washroom, and it smelled…stay with me…AMAZING! I know it sounds weird, but it’s true. I ended up asking the staff what it was, and that’s how I found out about Fenwick Candles. It was their peppermint candle burning in there. I previously discussed how important it is to know what’s inside the candles you’re burning, and Fenwick Candles is one of cleanest. They use a unique organic coconut wax that’s non-toxic and even good enough to eat! They’re also made locally in Toronto with no synthetic additives, only clean and responsibly sourced raw materials.
Trish Fenwick is an art graduate who was hungry for creativity while working in the hospitality industry. She ran a bar in Toronto and candlelight was crucial to their aesthetic. But the candles they were buying were expensive and filled with chemicals. She had a feeling she could make ones herself, using natural ingredients and essential oils, that were cheaper…and she did! What started out as a hobby business blossomed into Fenwick Candles, a company that’s conscious of the holistic health of its consumers and its environmental footprint.
Let’s chat to Trish!
What drew you to the art of candle making and wanting to create your wax mix? In 2013 I used to run a little dive bar and setting the ambiance was a fun part of the job. We drenched the simple space in dim red lights and candles. While handling purchasing and replenishment for the bar, I couldn't believe how much money we were spending on kerosene candles. Kerosene is a petroleum based bi-product and I wanted to avoid this kind of consumption. To give a bit of background here, I am a fine arts graduate and bleeding environmentalist in the making. With a passion for creativity and making, I figured I could make a better product that would light up the bar, look good, and be of equal or lesser cost. And I did! At the time I used commercial soy wax as it was the newest and greenest thing in the candle market. I started a hobby business by selling unscented candles to restaurants around Toronto for a year, and that eventually led to working with essential oils, and soon participating in markets all over the city. A couple years into aromatherapy candle making I became more aware of the negative impacts of working with soy wax – from a product perspective as well as an environmental one. I moved to commercial coconut wax which was slowly coming into the market at the time. However, this wax also proved to be controversial. While I loved the art of candle making and working with essential oils, I was so focused on the wax itself. I was connected to learning about the fundamentals of where our ingredients came from and the positive or negative impacts depending on the processes used. Thinking about candle making on a global scale, it is an unregulated billion-dollar industry, and no one was really educating and challenging the impacts of consuming these ingredients. I sought out chemical engineers and designed our very own original coconut wax. This process was an ever-growing one that occurred over a couple years. We have been using our own wax for 5 years now.
How do essential oils and the practice of aromatherapy play a role in your process? Essential oils represented a certain kind of magic to me, precious extracts that are literally juiced from nature! These extracts have been used for millennia as medicine, cleaners, and aphrodisiacs. The very practical use of plants seems so romantic to me. To dedicate my time to a language that is so archaic yet contemporary is humbling, exciting and fundamental all at the same time. I can trust it. Essential oils can activate all your senses, for better or worse. They are potent and need to be used with respect and care in application. There is a chemical science that should be understood to truly evoke their best characteristics. It really challenges you. If you want to showcase a natural product at its optimal performance you will find limitations, which is why so many products Frankenstein their own version of what they think a scent smells like, this is called fragrance and is a synthetic chemical. Essential oils are costly and time consuming to learn but they’re a natural chemical.
What inspires your fragrant blends? Their ability to throw scent and burn well is my main inspiration. In my opinion, not all essential oils do well in candlelight; and sometimes the more different essential oils you mix together the more the individual scents can then get lost. Some are better suited in another medium, such as diluted in a carrier oil for body application, room spray or in a diffuser. The actual essential oil dictates everything for me, and then within those options I find notes that complement each other. We offer a collection that predominantly has independent scents. The intention here was to allow the customer to light one, two or three different scents at a time and create their own blend. It allows the user to really feel and identify with the single scent they are smelling, and then get playful and try different combinations if they wish. For example, if you're in the mood for just lavender, you light your lavender candle. But if you want to elevate and invigorate that space further, you could pair it with peppermint to contrast and cut the sweetness from the lavender. Or if you want a heavier base note, try pairing it with a woody candle to change the whole mood. I see it as painting with scent.
Plants can be distilled into many different solutions (like resins, oils, absolutes, tinctures, extracts, etc.), and not all plants create essential oils. For instance, pods from vanilla orchids are processed into an extract used mostly in baking. There is no such thing as a vanilla essential oil, only an extract. An extract is alcohol based and wouldn't burn the same way. The smell of fresh vanilla bean in baking is divine, however if you're using a vanilla scented candle, its 100% fragrance and can vary greatly in its version, and what chemicals that version consists of. It hugs the air and your nose differently, often giving me headaches and I simply don't find it enjoyable. There are a lot of drawbacks to using synthetics in our daily rituals, like health concerns. The term "fragrance" in an ingredient list can include upwards of 3,000 different constituents (arsenic being one of them), which is nuts! For me, the purity of using a natural plant product surpasses the notion of wanting something outside of those rules. Candle making is very scientific, there's a chemical reaction between the wax, wick, flame, and scent. When working with natural ingredients you find limitations frequently within those variables. Fragrance was designed to bypass all these limitations and cheapen the price of achieving any scent.
Do you have a favourite memory associated with a smell? Sweet, wooded forests. Some of my fondest memories growing up were spent backcountry camping or horseback riding. The honeyed earthen, sometimes dark, lush almost resin-like base notes bring a sense of wild and familiar to heart.
What’s your go-to candle from your collection, and why? My go-to combinations are to light a couple of candles at the same time – no.9 black spruce and no.1 lavender x eucalyptus. The lavender compliments the wooded context with its herbaceous caramelized balsamic notes, and the eucalyptus is a touch of camphor to cut through it all, keeping it light and open.
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