CANDLE SPOTLIGHT: Tiki Mango Mai Tai

Products: candle  
Area used in:  living room
Time Period: end of April - beginning of June

Description: Drink in a tropical blend of mango nectar, jasmine flower and sunkissed grapefruit...now who wants to hula?

Missing notes: pineapple, passionfruit, honeysuckle, kukui wood, sugarcane, musk, rum absolute

Trivia: Maitai is Tahitian for "good"; ingredients for the cocktail includes rum, curacao, orgeat syrup and lime juice


So as you all may or may not know, I always have a group of scents for set amount of time. Usually this group has a theme of sorts; this go-round I have fruity cocktail theme - Island Margarita, Island Colada, Pink Sangria and Sparkling Mojito. I was looking for another fruity cocktail type scent and I thought I'd give this a try. Normally I tend to avoid scents based off bodycare but desperate times call for desperate measures.

The performance for this bad boi was decent. At the very beginning, it was acting a little sluggish and the wax pooled out way too slowly but after a few burns, the wicks autocorrected themselves and have been burning just fine ever since. The throw is ok; I'd describe it as medium-ish which is fine with me as the scent as not that enjoyable for it any stronger.

As you know, this scent is based off the signature bodycare . As I could give less than a damn about bodycare, I couldn't you tell how similar the candle and the bodycare are. That said, you can totally tell that this a signature scent cuz the notes smell very artificial and bodycare-ish. You first get a noseful of intensely sweet bubblegum-like mango followed  by a small hint of equally sweet artificial pineapple and both fruit notes are wrapped in sugarcane. The candle notes mention jasmine...I guess. What floral note I get more instead is thick heady drippy honeysuckle. Overall, I can see the direction BBW was going with this scent as it does have sweet generic fruity beverage vibe to it...though it remains to be seen if it smells like a mai tai which brings me to this next point...

If I were creating this scent, I would go in another direction. I would take Pineapple Palm Leaf and mix in the notes from Calypso Sun (mandarin, peach, mango, passionfruit), a little bit of Tropical Spice and the lime note from Lime Granita Margarita. If you're gonna have a scent with "mai tai" in the name, dammit I want it to smell like mai tai! Furthermore...

What the hell does a mai tai have to do with Hawaii? Not a damn thing! The Mai Tai was created by a white dude to impress his Tahitian friends. Also, tiki has nothing to do with Hawaii but rather Polynesian cultures. Now granted your average Jo Schmoe doesn't know the difference between Hawaiian and Tahitian/Polynesian but still. That said BBW has never been the best at research and representing various cultures properly and this is a perfect example of that. I mean "who wants to hula?"...really BBW?!

At any rate, TMMT is a cute unoffensive simple scent and honestly there's not much more to say about it. I don't regret buying it at all but I don't see myself rushing to buy more and I certainly wouldn't be heartbroken if it didn't come back in the near future. If you like the bodycare based scents or into simple fruit scents, then you'll probably like it otherwise, don't bother.