Every winter diptyque dedicates three candles to the Christmas holiday season. With generous wafts of scent and illustrations of imaginary creatures by Philippe Baudelocque, these candles rekindle the heart of a child who is reborn like a Phoenix, all ablaze like a Dragon or pure like a Unicorn.

Street artist Philippe Baudelocque honed his art on the walls of a town that he rendered magical with dreamlike animals in the Nineties. Having studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris, this artist who created huge, impermanent chalk frescoes offered passers-by the chance to experience something magical, understanding as he did how to unite the dream of a child who can see the invisible to knowledge that plunges the eye into the infinite cosmic starriness of the geometric patterns that shape his mineral, vegetable and animal subject matter. The vastness of space, the stars and the cosmos are the vanishing point of his gaze and creations. This inventor of chimerical forms and magical animals revive the spirit of mythology in urban environments in our time. He is currently collaborating on the Lasco Project at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
When diptyque met the artist, we decided to launch three candles in our Winter Collection into outer space by integrating his work on the constellation theme. Philippe Baudelocque then worked on an astral fresco and three mythological creatures, each with its own constellation and candle: a Unicorn, a Dragon and a Phoenix.

The Unicorn illustrates our Forêt givrée (Frosted forest) Hinoki wood candle, a Japanese conifer whose name means (quite aptly) « fire tree », lifted with resin, pine needles and mint notes. It is green in colour. The Dragon illustrates the Feu d’agrumes, (citrus fire) candle, with its warm, tangy scent incorporating orange peel, transalpine citrus, smoked wood and spices. Gold and red are the colours of the Dragon, in harmony with the scent of these ingredients burning together. The Phoenix is the creature for the Larmes d’encens (Tears of incense) candle with myrrh, incense and cinnamon and the colour blue…perhaps the colour of renaissance in this instance?

On a cosmic scale, it may well be that the stars last the time of a candle. And considering the tiny dot of life that a human being represents in a universe that is constantly expanding, how can an individual make sense of it all without recourse to the imagination? And how can anyone do that without recalling the most ancient myths? We need conversion scales here. And then perhaps a candle can shed light on what the aroma of the stars is really like.