The candle that Wendy Lewis, a Manhattan beauty consultant, received as a gift from a wealthy client last fall was not an ordinary knickknack.

Not long after Lewis escorted the woman to a Botox treatment and held her hand through the procedure, a chauffeur dropped off a candle from the British fragrance house Jo Malone. Perfumed with the company’s signature lime, basil, and mandarin scent, it had four wicks and weighed five and a half pounds. But even heftier was its price: $345.

The Jo Malone Luxury Candle, one of the most expensive available, is made by hand in West Sussex, England. Jo Malone’s experts craft the candles by layering differently scented wax, allowing each layer to dry before they pour the next. “It’s the best way for the scent to disseminate in the air,” explains Lucy Perdomo-Ruehlemann, Jo Malone’s vice president of global marketing. The company says it sells thousands of Luxury Candles per year; each one burns for 230 hours.

“It’s more than a candle—it’s a work of art,” says Lewis, who keeps it in her bedroom because “it’s too elegant for the rest of the house.”

Even if they aren’t fresh off Christie’s auction block, candles are commanding increasingly impressive prices. In 1963, when Diptyque, a French fragrance house, started selling hawthorn-scented candles for $19, they were considered exotic and luxurious. Today, a growing number of consumers think nothing of forking over $100 or more for what essentially amounts to a column of perfumed wax.

Indeed, prices are ratcheting upward as candlemakers compete for prestige in a saturated market and companies expand their brands. India Hicks and Gucci are now marketing scented candles. And the tiniest candles might be the most profitable. The House of Creed, a British perfumer, has a 6.6-ounce candle priced at $75. Jo Malone sells a triplet of votive candles for $95. And a 5.2-ounce candle from La Prairie, a Swiss beauty brand, costs $100. Currently, candle sales account for about half of the $5 billion spent on home fragrances in the U.S.

“There’s no question that in recent years there’s been a definite uptick in sales of higher-end candles,” says Barbara Miller, spokeswoman for the National Candle Association. “It’s an affordable luxury.”

That depends on your definition of affordable.

Retailers and lifestyle brands are feeling the warmth from high-end candle sales too. Mainstream home-goods companies such as Pier 1, clothing chains such as Banana Republic, and couture designers such as John Galliano have joined in the candle craze. Galliano’s branded candles are sold in Diptyque stores for $60 a pop. That’s a few bucks more than Diptyque’s own candles, which start at $48.

Other retailers, including Stefani Greenfield, who co-owns the national chain of Scoop boutiques, are catching on to the idea that a candle is a portable, pleasurable portal into the brand. Greenfield launched a Scoop fragrance this year and plans to follow it with a candle, to be released in September. “Candles are giftable, a great point of sale, and good branding,” Greenfield says. “The candle is a great way to build fragrance sales.” Nobody wants to see writing or a logo on a candle, she believes, so she placed Scoop’s logo on the lid to the candle’s container.

At just $45, the price of the Scoop candle doesn’t, well, hold a candle to the Jo Malone luxury model. But the same tactic is at work. In essence, by buying a scent with strong associations, consumers are paying to bring the brand home with them. “Candles have ignited again,” says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, New York. Younger shoppers are “cocooning,” or creating cozy home environments, with their candles, while Generation X and baby-boomer consumers are paying to create a spa-like feeling at home. And retailers are reaping big benefits from the buying trends. “Candles are an easy way to get front and center in the mind of the consumer,” Cohen says. “They are low cost, high margin, and easy to source out to manufacturers.”

But a candle doesn’t have to cost a lot for retailers to turn a profit selling them. At Yankee Candle in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, candles on clearance can cost under $10, and sales are booming. “Last year, our revenue was $700 million. Translate that to retail sales and that’s about $1 billion,” says Rick Ruffolo, Yankee Candle’s senior vice president of brand marketing and innovation. “We’ve been at a very strong growth rate.”

Even with its lower price points, Yankee Candle is considered part of the premium-candle market—its wares are sold in department or specialty stores—the main driver of growth in the industry.

“The selection of fragrances plays a critical role in these candles,” says Karen Doskow, associate manager of consumer products at Kline & Co., a consultancy and market research company in New Jersey. Staying competitive in the crowded candle industry is difficult, so beyond introducing sky-high price points in an attempt to stand out, candlemakers are also developing products that tap in to general consumer trends. Candles made with natural or organic ingredients, such as soy wax and cotton wicks, cash in on consumers’ environmental consciousness. For evidence that green sells, one need look no further than Yankee Candle’s 2005 acquisition of Aroma Naturals, whose candles have such names as Ambiance, Peace, and Relaxing, and are made with 100 percent plant aromas and essential oils. They’re custom blended in a variety of natural waxes, use lead-free cotton wicks, and are sold at venues like Whole Foods.

Meanwhile, in keeping with the culinary-tourism and high-end-dining trends, Diptyque will introduce three new scents this August that sound as if they were plucked from Thomas Keller’s herb garden. Wild fennel, coriander, and maquis (a shrub found in southern France) were inspired by the travel journals of Desmond Knox-Leet—one of the company’s founders—and will start at $55 each.

All this for objects that, attractive though they may be, will eventually go up in smoke.

“Would I have spent $345 on a candle? Probably not,” says Wendy Lewis, the beauty consultant. Although she loves the smell, she has only lit the candle a few times, because she isn’t often home. “I’m terrified of leaving candles—I only put them on when I’m there.”

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