So what does a newly unboxed Mac smell like?
For Andrew Green, cofounder of Twelve South, a company who creates and sells accessories exclusively for Apple, the whiff that comes with a newly opened Mac was so ephemeral he wanted to prolong it. Green took the cue of several initially apprehensive Apple product owners who later confessed that they sniffed the products once fished out of the box. From there, he attempted to mimic the scent.
Green's company has recently released a new product that took the internet by storm. Adding to their reserve of merchandise, Twelve South introduced the "New Mac," a soy wax candle that emulates the smell of a new Mac being taken out of its packaging. Seeing as we're months away from this being an April fool's joke, this is 100 percent legitimate but delightfully outré.
Two hours after it went on sale to the public, a whirlpool of individuals who frequented Apple sites gushed and raved. In that amount of time, word got passed around quickly. As a result, the hundreds of candles Green created had sold out by the end of the day.
For Green, it wasn't clear-cut from the beginning. Speaking to Adweek, Green admitted that the candle was conceived as this "crazy idea I had a couple months ago [for a candle] that smells like that smell when you open a new Mac for the first time."
From then on, the idea slowly took form, with Green ardently attempting to figure out what combinations would be appropriate to create a genuine smell of a newly opened Mac. The objective for Green was to recreate the experience of opening a new Mac and then inhaling the metallic and oddly pleasant smell of the piece of tech. He also kept in mind that the candle should go an extra mile. It shouldn't stop at being a novelty item, but it should also offer an aroma that you'd actually want wafting in your household for longer periods.
"The idea is tongue-in-cheek and fun, but at the end of the day we wanted to make a candle that we wanted in our house," Green told Adweek.
Who knew that the combined smells of aluminum, adhesive and a host of other materials inside a Mac could be rendered artificially using different scents such as mint, peach, basil, lavender, mandarin and sage? Well, Green knew.
If you want to buy the New Mac candle, it's going to cost you $24. However, due to its rapid popularity, the product is currently unavailable. Over at Twelve South, Green said that their team is working hard to keep up with the demand since all the candles are hand-poured, which should take some time to mass produce. No complaints here, but it would have been awesome if you could control the candle with your phone to truly up the experience.
