The notoriously colorful co-owner of Cire Trudon candle company, Ramdane Touhami, has turned the candles favored by Napoleon and Marie Antoinette into a modern-day cult obsession. Cire claims it is now the supplier of every Paris cathedral except Notre Dame (which, Touhami says, buys its candles from China), and Catherine Deneuve and Nicolas Sarkozy are hooked. “Giambattista Valli loves the Odeur de Lune scent,” says Robert Gerstner, an owner of New York’s Aedes de Venustas (Stateside, the candles are sold only there and at John Derian and Barneys New York). In September six new scents will be added to the line, including the leather and tobacco–based Une Hotel de la Havane and Balmoral, which smells remarkably like wet grass and soil.
