Gwyneth Paltrow took the internet by storm last week for debuting her Goopiest e-commerce venture yet. It's a candle that supposedly smells like the business owner's vagina — retailing for a cool $75 (and, of course, already sold out).
It was only a matter of time before someone came up with the next logical copycat: This Smells Like My Penis. But the follow-up version has a slightly surprising origin story. Taxi, a Canadian ad agency, created the replica in the name of gender pay equality.
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In an Instagram post, the agency debuted the product, writing, "We heard @goop was selling a Smells Like My Vagina candle for $75. So we made a Smells Like My Penis candle for $100, in accordance with Canada’s gender pay gap."
That's right. According to Taxi, this candle costs 25% more than than its vagina-smelling equivalent, the exact percentage of the gender pay gap in Canada. The company is hoping to bring awareness to the issue with their attention-grabbing product. As the label reads: "Burn this candle for the scent of women getting paid 75 cents on the dollar." The company also plans to donate all proceeds to the Canadian Women's Foundation.
So, what does it actually smell like? Allegra Wiesenfeld from Taxi explains that the candle doesn’t have a scent. Though, she adds, “there were many jokes made in the office about whether we should melt down an Old Spice deodorant stick or make it smell like sandalwood.”
Wiesenfeld worked alongside Reid Plaxton to come up with the idea. The emphasis of the candle (no matter what it smells like) is the absurdity that one candle would cost more than the other simply because of gender. "As ridiculous as a Smells Like My Penis candle is — the fact that there’s still a gender pay gap in 2020 is far more ridiculous," says Alexis Bronstorph, the executive creative director of Taxi.
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You can pre-order your very own penis candle at www.smellslikemypeniscandle.com. Whether you actually burn it or not is up to you.
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