The Openness Test: Why Some People Crave Strange New Scents and Others Stay Loyal to One Candle
Two Friends, Two Completely Different Shelves
I have a friend who has never bought the same scent twice. Her shelf is a museum of one-offs: a smoky incense thing, a green fig, something that genuinely smells like wet stone and pepper. Ask her what she’s burning and she’ll say “oh, this weird one” with real delight.
I have another friend who has bought the same vanilla candle nine times. Nine. She knows the exact one. She would walk past a thousand niche fragrances to get back to it, and she is, for the record, completely happy.
For years I assumed one of them had better taste than the other. They don’t. They just sit on opposite ends of a single personality trait, and that trait is doing more to decide what’s in their rooms than budget, trend, or season ever will.
Psychologists call it Openness to Experience. You can call it the difference between “ooh, what’s that?” and “yes, this, again, thank you.”
What Openness Actually Is (in About Thirty Seconds)
Openness is one of the Big Five personality traits, and it’s basically your appetite for novelty. High-Openness people are pulled toward the new, the complex, and the slightly strange. Low-Openness people aren’t boring (this is the part everyone gets wrong). They’re efficient. They’ve found what works and see no reason to keep auditioning replacements.
Researchers break Openness into facets like fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, and ideas. The two that matter most for your room are aesthetics (how much you crave rich sensory experiences) and actions (how much you prefer variety over routine). Those are the dials that decide whether a complicated scent reads as “interesting” or “exhausting.”
One honest caveat, because I’d rather you trust me later: the science here is suggestive, and only suggestive. Studies on personality and smell are genuinely mixed, and Openness doesn’t make your nose more sensitive. What it shifts is what you go looking for: your taste in variety, while your hardware stays the same. So treat the test below as a mirror, not a diagnosis.
The Two-Question Test
No forms. Just answer honestly:
- You found a candle you love. Do you (a) immediately want to try three more like it from the same brand, or (b) buy two backups of this exact one so you never run out?
- A friend hands you something that smells like “incense, leather, and a faint barnyard.” Is that (a) intriguing, or (b) a hard no?
Two A’s → you lean high Openness. Two B’s → you lean low Openness. One of each → welcome to the middle, where most people actually live and where, conveniently, the best advice is “have one of each kind.”
High Openness: The Novelty-Seeker
This is you if: you get bored of a scent the moment you’ve “solved” it, you’re drawn to descriptions with words like smoky, green, resinous, unexpected, and a room that smells merely nice feels like a missed opportunity.
You want fragrances with plot: scents that change as they warm up and don’t announce themselves in the first three seconds.
Your families:
| Family | Smells Like | Why It Works for You |
|---|---|---|
| Incense / Smoky | Temple smoke, dry resin, a struck match | Complex, a little austere, never resolves into “candle” |
| Green / Earthy | Fig leaf, tomato vine, wet stone, vetiver | Cool and odd; reads as nature, not perfume |
| Woody curveballs | Sandalwood with leather, cedar with pepper | Familiar base, strange twist — exactly your sweet spot |
Avoid: the big crowd-pleasers. Sweet vanilla and clean cotton will smell “fine” to you for a week, then invisible.
Low Openness: The One-Candle Loyalist
This is you if: you reread favourite books, reorder the same coffee, and find genuine relief in a smell you already trust. You are not missing out. You have won.
You want fragrances that are legible — warm, clear, and the same every time. Your room scent has exactly one job: to tell you you’re home.
Your families:
| Family | Smells Like | Why It Works for You |
|---|---|---|
| Soft Vanilla / Gourmand | Warm sugar, milk, a faint bakery | Comforting, unambiguous, ages well in a room |
| Clean Citrus | Lemon, bergamot, “freshly tidied” | Bright, friendly, zero learning curve |
| Lavender / Clean Cotton | Laundry, calm, a made bed | The scent of nothing being wrong |
Avoid: anything sold to you as “challenging,” “polarising,” or “an acquired taste.” Life is short and your vanilla is right there.
The Middle: Most of Us
If you split the test, you’re probably the largest group, and your strategy is the most fun: a comfort anchor for daily life, plus one wildcard for when you want your room to feel different. Burn the vanilla on a normal Tuesday; light the smoky fig when you’re cooking something ambitious or company’s coming. You don’t have to pick a personality. You can rotate.
Now Match It to a Format
Picking the right family is half the job. The other half is the delivery system, because Openness also predicts how much “event” you want from your scent.
| Your Type | Best Format | Why | Match |
|---|---|---|---|
| High Openness | Incense / hand-lit | It’s a ritual with smoke and change — the novelty is the point | ◎ |
| High Openness | Scent diffuser, rotated often | Lets you swap oils and chase the new without committing | ○ |
| Low Openness | Reed diffuser | Set it once, smell it forever, never think about it again | ◎ |
| Low Openness | A signature candle, in multiples | Same scent, always in stock — peak loyalist energy | ◎ |
| The Middle | One candle + one diffuser | Comfort on default, wildcard on demand | ○ |
A quick legal-but-useful note: everything here is about scenting a room — your space, not your skin. Home fragrance and personal fragrance follow different rules, and the strange smoky stuff that’s thrilling in a hallway is a different decision entirely on a person.
If You Only Remember One Line
High Openness? Buy the weird one. Your room is allowed to be interesting, and you’ll re-light the strange fig long after a safe vanilla has gone invisible to you.
Low Openness? Buy the backup. Find your one, then buy it again without a flicker of guilt. Consistency isn’t a lack of imagination; it’s knowing yourself.
Openness is just one of five traits, of course, and the others quietly shape your shelf too — that’s the longer story in why your personality matters more than trends, and if you want all five mapped to specific picks, the Big Five candle guide does exactly that. Still not sure which way you lean? Take the two-minute quiz and let your answers, rather than your aspirations, do the choosing.
Because the best scent for your room is the one that matches how much surprise you actually want to come home to. Sophistication and popularity never really entered into it.
Was this article helpful?