Target is now selling candles that smell like breakfast cereals. As the website Mental Floss put it: "If a whiff of Lucky Charms is enough to transport you to a simpler (read: happier) time, you can now access the aroma on demand."
Well. I cannot tell you what Lucky Charms smells like, except maybe oats and Styrofoam. Don't get me wrong — it's my favorite cereal. It is delicious. It is not magically delicious, inasmuch as no necromancy is involved. There are not Druids standing over the assembly line, chanting ancient rites to bring forth the Sweetening. I would prefer that children learn about modern food technology, and be told that it is technologically delicious, thanks to a mature scientific discipline that infuses the pastel-hued nodules with an acceptable simulacrum of marshmallow flavor, whatever that is.
But that would go against the mythology of the cereal, which requires the intervention of a Leprechaun, his face contorted with such rapturous mania that Bacchus himself would tell him to dial it back. Ever since the cereal was invented, we have heard Lucky say the same thing in commercials: "The kids are after me Lucky Charms." Whether this was true, or the result of a paranoid delusion, we can't say. I mean, most kids have relatively easy access to the stuff, and the idea that you would chase a supernatural being to steal his possessions seems ill-advised.
Lucky would always come up with a means of escape, waving his shillelagh: "Oi'll make a zeppelin for to flee upon!" Or something. Then the zeppelin would burst into flames, he'd plummet to earth, the kids would get his cereal, and he'd be cheerfully resigned to it all.
A real Leprechaun would point his magic stick at the insolent youths and turn them into croaking frogs, or set them on fire, or shout, "You want my cereal? Fine by me, lads," cast them into a pit, bury them in an avalanche of yellow moons and pink hearts, and make the skies rain milk.
Why were they his Lucky Charms, though? Did he invent them? No evidence suggests that he did, any more than Cap'n Crunch was responsible for his eponymous yellow mouth-shredders. Perhaps you can contemplate these things as you inhale the fumes from the candle.
But what does it smell like? Chasing an imp through the Irish countryside should require hints of brimstone, peat and sweat.
There's no candle — yet — with the Froot Loops aroma. This seems an obvious choice, because Toucan Sam, who would jump around the cartoon proclaiming that he "followed his nose, it always knows," implies that the cereal had an olfactory profile. Given that Sam was a bird, it would be more accurate if he shouted, "I follow my beak, it picks up the reek," but that probably wouldn't move much product.
