This Was the First Yankee Candle Scent Ever

Certain home goods become more than a purchase of need or convenience, and evolve into a bona-fide cultural phenomenon. 

Most recently, it’s been people taking to TikTok to show off color-coordinated walls of Stanley mugs, in volumes that would cause water poisoning if actually consumed in succession. But perhaps no single item has more firmly established its place on the literal mantel of middle-class homes than the Yankee Candle. 

Neither the scents inside nor their purchasers are known for their restraint, and they’ve been chugging out almost visible clouds of seasonal odor since the company’s founding in 1969. Another facet that’s fed the craze of Yankee Candle collecting is the outlandish amount of available fragrances, with a catalog of smells that’s the nasal equivalent of a rich kid’s 128-pack of crayons. The brand, of course, would never have managed to launch such a monstrous roster in the beginning, begging the question, what was the original scent that started it all?

There’s a couple of different answers depending on your interpretation of “first.” One of which directly relied on actual crayons for its existence. That’s the very first Yankee Candle ever crafted, not even with a future business in mind, by a 16-year-old named Mike Kittredge. As the story goes, he needed a Christmas gift for his mother, but was short on cash. Instead of scrimping together change, he melted down red crayons into a milk carton with a string serving as a wick, and his mother received the world’s first Yankee Candle that holiday. Their neighbor saw the candle, wanted one for herself and things grew from there. Unfortunately, the scent of the candle in question isn’t recorded, though it does seem to have been a scented candle per sources. 

Yankee Candle’s official marketing strangely doesn't see fit to give their first ever fragrance its flowers. I’ve reached out on X for clarification, but they have yet to respond, I assume dealing with constant tweets from people asking where Spiced Pumpkin is in stock. 

Thankfully to give us at least some basic guidance, the feverish obsession the candles have inspired has created some unofficial historians. One of these, Andy Fair, who runs both a Yankee Candle and cologne dedicated YouTube Channel as well as an online resource, mentions that he’s been led to believe that he’s identified the original scent: the since discontinued “Roses on Cliff Walk.” He also refers to it on a separate page as a “known bit of history,” though with no source. If he’s referring to the scent of those very first candles, the red coloration and, I assume, a kid’s free access to roses would seem to line up.

Fair also seems to indicate that, given that milk cartons full of wax aren’t exactly commercially viable, the first publicly available iteration of the candles were in “Cannikins,” metal cans sold in the 1970s that seem to predate the now-iconic apothecary jars. The scent he specifically mentions is “Spiced Apple,” but there seem to have been a couple scents here, and listings do make reference to them being the “original line of Yankee Candles.” 

So, the exact scent of the first-ever Yankee Candle would be known only to Kittredge’s mother, but it may have been a rose-based scent that would turn into “Roses on Cliff Walk.” The first one commercially distributed may have been a fruity collection spearheaded by Spiced Apple, in the form of “cannikins.” 

Being that Kittredge passed away in 2019, we’ll have to hope the original recipe was tucked away somewhere, or we'll never have 100 percent certainty.