South Korean youngsters and millennials indulge in ‘small happiness’ – home fragrances

It's 10pm in Munjeong-dong, a fashionable neighbourhood in Seoul, and Vora Jeon, 34, is embarking on her nightly ritual: flowery Parisian tea, gentle European house music, and, most crucially, a sunset-inspired candle called “Rare Sky”. It smells of tulip, wood, and rhubarb.

“I love the kind of pink sky,” says Jeon, the CEO and creative director of Seoul-based fragrance company MOTE. “When I see that kind of thing, I feel really happy. I use that kind of candle when I want to refresh my memory of it.”

Across South Korea, there’s a growing emphasis on home scent.

Candles are the classic housewarming or wedding gift. Pots of fragrance diffusers are tucked into lift corners and onto car dashboards, and displayed in office cubicles and classrooms. Diffusers perfume even the shabbiest public restrooms and taxis. Convenience stores often have fewer varieties of candy than of air-care products – candles, room sprays, car vent sticks, fabric sprays and diffusers.

Worldwide, home fragrance is having a moment. The global air-care market was valued at US$10 billion last year and will grow to US$12 billion by 2023, according to Allied Market Research.

With that growth, South Korea has become the largest and fastest-expanding air-care market, according to Taeho Sim, a Seoul-based partner at ‎management consulting firm A.T. Kearney.

The fragrance market totalled 2.7 trillion South Korean won (US$2.49 billion) in 2016, according to Sim. Candle products grew from US$55.3 million in 2013 to US$184.5 million in 2016. The country imported three times as many candles in 2017 as it did 10 years ago, according to data from the Korea Customs Service.

Shinsegae, a luxury department store, said air-fragrance sales increased 60 per cent year-over-year in 2015, while ubiquitous cosmetics store Olive Young reported that sales of health products like candles and diffusers jumped 90 per cent in the autumn of 2017 compared with the previous autumn.