Scented Candle 'Odalisque' Cire Trudon

The name of the Odalisque scented candle from the prestigious perfume and candle house Cire Trudon mentally transports you to the exotic world of the East, to the times of sultans, harems, and numerous beautiful wives and concubines. You might expect the candle's fragrance to be spicy, oriental, seductive, and sultry, as warm as a woman's embrace, but that's where the real surprise awaits.
Instead, the fresh, lively woody-citrus scent of the candle speaks not of the East itself, but of the artistic movement known as Orientalism. This is the style in which the 19th-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres created his paintings of "Odalisques."
These paintings did not depict real women, historical figures, or even Eastern women at all.
Ingres' "Odalisques" were the product of his own imagination; an attempt to convey foreign customs through the power of imagination, without having studied or seen the subjects of his work in real life. Why? For the sake of beauty, as the master himself admitted, "as far as truth is concerned, I prefer it to be somewhat exaggerated, although that is risky."
Nude women of European appearance, whose faces and bodies resemble the ideal women of classicism, merely illustrate the Western perception of Eastern traditions and luxury—a perception often naive and fundamentally inaccurate. The candle, with its exotic notes of red juniper and orange blossom, vanilla, and citrus, is an attempt to recreate not the image of the East, but the artist's dream of the East.