Six places, six fragrances, some thoroughly beautiful porcelain and a garden designer who used to work in audit. We tried to remain composed. We managed about a paragraph.
There is a particular kind of candle you keep long after the candle part is over. The vessel goes on to a second career holding pencils, or earrings, or one heroic sprig of rosemary. Told London simply made that the plan from the start, which strikes us as tremendously sensible and also rather romantic.
A drawer of perfume
Lillie Edgar was born in the Seychelles and grew up between the islands and her grandparents' home in India. Her grandmother kept a drawer of perfumes her grandfather had chosen for her over the years, and her mother had an art studio, which between them is about as good a start in fragrance and design as a person could reasonably ask for. Lillie studied at the University of Aberdeen and City University, London, spent a career in wealth management, trained in interior design and founded her first home fragrance brand in 2018. At Told London she writes the briefs the perfumers and the illustrator work to, designs the packaging and decides exactly how everything looks. That is a great deal of deciding, and she is clearly very good at it.
A garden designer, formerly of audit
Christopher Edgar grew up in Northern Ireland, studied Law and Finance at Aberdeen and spent more than a decade in audit, risk and change across professional services and banking. He then retrained as a garden designer at the Inchbald School of Design, which is the sort of career change most of us only daydream about during a long meeting. The gardens he has built run through every fragrance, and he looks after the commercial side, so the business has both a very good nose and a very good spreadsheet.
The two of them met in Scotland on the first day of their MSc, married in Venice, spent their formative years in London, raised their family in the South East of England and now live near Lake Como with their three children. If that sounds like the plot of a rather lovely film, we are inclined to agree.
Six places, all of them theirs
Here is the clever bit. The Wanderings Collection is six fragrances, each inspired by a place, and every place is one they have lived: City Grandeur for London, Glorious Gardens for England, Highland Retreat for Scotland, Night Blooms for India, Island Breeze for the Seychelles and Dancing Light for Lake Como. Light one and you are, in a small and fragrant way, borrowing a chapter of their life. Frightfully intimate, really. We are trying to keep it together.
City Grandeur puts bergamot and black tea over a vetiver base, in honour of London's parks. Glorious Gardens is geranium, rose and violet, which is to say an English border in full swing. Dancing Light brings wisteria and jasmine together with watery notes and a warm sandalwood finish, and has been collecting awards at a rate that is starting to feel slightly showy. Each one is composed with a leading perfumery house, Givaudan and Mastenbroek among them.
The porcelain, about which we may be a little overexcited
Every Wanderings illustration is drawn by hand by the artist Kerry Lemon, in fine black line, and each one belongs to its place. The Glorious Gardens candle comes wrapped in roses, hydrangea, lily of the valley and a pansy, with a bee who appears to be having the best day of his life. The larger candle and the diffuser wear a solid gold-coloured metal lid, and the whole lot arrives in FSC-certified packaging printed with plant-based inks.
The candles are hand-poured in England in 100% natural soy wax, the diffusers are filled in England with natural rattan reeds, and here is the part we like best: when one runs out, you refill it. Candle refills even arrive in a hand-illustrated cotton bag made by Bags of Ethics, which strikes us as the most charming piece of packaging in some time.
The awards, mentioned modestly
We shall try to be terribly English about this. In 2026, Dancing Light won Best Luxury Candle at the Platinum Magazine Beauty Awards and the Haute Beauty Award for Excellence in Home Fragrance at the Attracta Beauty Awards, and was a finalist for Best Interior Fragrance at The Fragrance Foundation Awards. Glorious Gardens won Best Luxury Diffuser at the Platinum Magazine Beauty Awards. In 2025, the year it launched, Told London was shortlisted for Best Newcomer at The Fragrance Foundation Awards, took silver and bronze at the Pure Beauty Awards and made two shortlists at the Boutique Star Awards. That is quite enough glory for one paragraph, so we shall stop.
Where to begin
To dip a toe in, the 80g candle burns for 16 hours or more and makes an exceedingly good present. Ready to commit? The 300g candle gives you 60 hours and more, and the reed diffuser keeps going for twelve weeks or so, which is longer than most of our New Year's resolutions. And for the truly devoted, a fine fragrance collection arrives in 2027. We shall be waiting by the door.
Browse the full Told London collection, wander through Candles + Home Fragrance, or find something for somebody lucky in Gifts. If you have a soft spot for things made by hand, we have written about what handmade really means, and there are plenty more British Brands and Family Owned brands to fall for.
You have, as they say, been Told.
Told London. Photography Ross Kirton. Illustration Kerry Lemon.
