FM Imagines: Harvard’s Entry into the Homesick Candle College Town Collection

Whether or not you're an expert in the field of olfaction I'm sure you have heard of the ubiquitous Homesick Candles: College Towns series. For clarity's sake, I'll entertain the possibility that you've been living under a rock for the last two years: Homesick, a company that somehow justifies selling $30 candles, created a candle line that attempts to capture the residential scents of college towns around the country. For example, their Berkeley description reads: “Small batch coffee and ocean air enveloping the town with early morning fog... Notes that don't seem to go together, but just like Berkeley, it's the weird that makes it good.”

The best part is that there are so many college towns to choose from: The Michigan candle smells like “the Big House with spiked hot chocolate” and the Madison candle can make your living room smell like the “cold morning air on game day.” So if you want your midlife crisis to be both artful and pitiful, you can light a candle that smells like deep-seated regret that the best years of your life have already past you.

But, as I was trying to find the most obnoxious candle description, I noticed the incredibly unprofessional oversight that Cambridge was left out of the series. When I eventually reach the final chapter of my life, at 35 or something, I want to spend my last days relaxing to the fragrant aromas I associated with my midterms, empty bank account, and utterly relentless alcoholism. “The good ol’ days.”

There's so much material to work with too: The golden scent of John Harvard's glistening shoe, or the flighty smell of a flock of Canada-Goose-jacket-wearing-tourists making their way through the Yard. So, as any diligent student would do, I've taken it upon myself to create my own Harvard-scented candle.

Introducing Homesick's Cambridge Scent: The Fourth Horseman of Gentrification. “This exquisite aroma will bring you back to a simpler time, where problems were out of sight, and by tenancy laws, legally out of mind. You'll be enraptured by the fresh waft of $8 bagels, $14 coffee, and a line of students at Milk Bar waiting to order 'crack pie.' And yes, it is seriously called crack pie, because its creator said it 'tastes like crack.' (I actually googled 'is it possible to gentrify crack,' but all I got were links to America's opium addiction.) Each candle is made from oil personally donated by Harvard's biggest investees. And rumor has it, every time you light up a candle a Final Club starts playing Mo Bamba.”

Adhering to Homesick standards, the candle is made with an all natural soy wax blend, molded by unpaid Harvard Shop laborers and tinted with a crimson hue. The candle burns for four years straight. Actually, non-stop. No matter how much you beg and plead for a break it just keeps on burning. Plus it fits perfectly on your mantle, where nobody will comment on it because nobody cares.