Burning scented oils is a great way to fragrance your home. Home fragrance oils are available in a wide variety of scents, and recently more and more companies have entered the scented oil market. A long time player in this market is The Body Shop, a company that has been selling home fragrance oils for decades. More recently, Yankee Candle Company has entered the game with their very own line of oils. In this article, I’ll provide a head-to-head comparison of these two popular products.
Before I begin, I should let you know that I’ve been affiliated with both of these companies. I worked at a Yankee Candle Company retail store for a few years, and I’ve also been a consultant for the direct sales branch of The Body Shop in the past. Although I am not currently affiliated with either company, one of the reasons I feel qualified to provide this product comparison is because I’ve had extensive experience with both product lines. I had a great experience working for both of these companies, and I promise not to let my prior work influence this article…Scout’s Honor.
The Basics of Burning Home Fragrance Oils
For those of you unfamiliar, here is a quick crash course in burning oils. To properly burn home fragrance oils, you’ll need an oil burner, which is a small item that has a dish for the oil and a place to hold a tea-light candle underneath. Any place that sells oils will probably also sell oil burners.
Once you have the burner, simply put anywhere from 4-12 drops of oil in the dish, depending on the amount of fragrance you like. Light a tea-light candle and place it under the dish. As the dish heats up, the wonderful fragrance of the oil should start to fill the room. After you have achieved your desired level of fragrance (typically 10 to 15 minutes), you can blow out the candle, and your house should stay filled with fragrance for several hours.
These two companies are pretty even in terms of price. Yankee Candle Company sells a .33 ounce bottle of oil for $7.99, while The Body Shop has an ever-so-slightly smaller .30 ounce bottle of oil available for $7.50. Once you account for the small size difference, these oils are essentially selling for the same price. Also, both companies periodically run specials on their oils, so sometimes one might be cheaper than the other. I like to stock up when oil is on sale, because you can store it safely and it never goes bad.
Fragrance Selection
Having a wide variety of fragrances is important, since it is easy to get bored with the same scent all of the time. The Body Shop clearly wins this category. There are currently 33 different home fragrance oils available on The Body Shop’s website, and they regularly are coming out with new & seasonal scents. A trip to an actual Body Shop store could reveal an even bigger selection of scents, since the store is bound to have out-of-season and discontinued oils in addition to the ones being currently produced.
In contrast, Yankee Candle has only ever produced 24 different scents of oil, and the majority of them are their newer scents which they are trying to promote. The reason for the smaller selection from Yankee Candle is simple: Yankee has only been selling oils since the beginning of 2007, whereas The Body Shop has been selling oils for years and years. I expect that it won’t take long for Yankee to catch-up and maybe even surpass The Body Shop in terms of fragrance selection.
I bought my first oil burner from The Body Shop years ago and I fell in love with it the day I got it. When burning an oil from The Body Shop, I find that I usually only need 4 or 5 drops of oil because the fragrance is very concentrated. Within minutes of firing up my oil burner, the oils from The Body Shop fill my home with a wonderful scent that you can smell everywhere in the house. The scents always smell natural and just plain good, and I’ve never been disappointed.
When Yankee Candle Company decided to start selling home fragrance oils, I had high hopes. I knew that Yankee made some of the world’s best candles, and I figured the oils would be just as good. The first thing I noticed was that the dispenser hole on the bottle of Yankee Candle oil was bigger, which means that more oil is dispensed with each drop. After filling the dish with an equivalent amount of oil, I began to wait.
I must say, it took quite a while for me to be able to smell the Yankee Candle oil. When I did finally catch the fragrance, it wasn’t nearly as “potent” as when I burn oil from The Body Shop. The Yankee Candle oil did manage to fill the room with fragrance, but I could not smell it throughout my house like I do when I burn Body Shop oils. Then, as the oil in the dish started to evaporate, the strangest thing happened. The Yankee Candle oil began to give off a distinctly “chemical” smell. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but my roommates agreed.
Wanting to give the Yankee Candle scented oils one more chance, I tried again the next evening. Instead of the normal 4-5 drops, this time I used significantly more oil. The extra oil did seem to help with the fragrance strength and you could definitely catch the scent better than the day before. But the same thing happened when the oil got lo–a distinct chemical odor was given off. When I added new oil to the dish, this chemical smell went away, but I shouldn’t have to constantly be adding more oil to avoid an unpleasant aroma.
Conclusion: The Body Shop wins!
Overall, I just wasn’t very impressed with the scented oils made by Yankee Candle Company and I will be sticking with oils from The Body Shop. Although the price is about the same, The Body Shop’s oils just seem to perform better in my experience. Yankee Candle claims to be the world leader in home fragrance, and although I usually love Yankee products, I think they missed the mark with the scented oil line. The Body Shop has had a lot more time to perfect their product than newcomer Yankee Candle…perhaps in a few years, Yankee will work out the kinks and some of these issues with their scented oils will be resolved.
