What's in Boy Smells Kush Now? The Full Ingredient Breakdown Before You Buy
Kush is named after a cannabis strain and contains no cannabis. No THC, no CBD, no hemp anything. Boy Smells says so plainly: the word on the label names an olfactive accord, a fragrance built to smell like the plant without any of the plant in the jar.
That gap between the name and the contents is the interesting part, because it is the same gap that shows up all over candle labels. Most people typing "what's in Boy Smells Kush" are really asking three smaller things. Is this clean enough to burn in my bedroom. Will it fill the room. Will it burn flat to the glass or dig a hole down the middle. All three answers live in the wax and the fragrance oil, which is the short list I read first on every candle that lands on my bench, including the pure beeswax candles we hand pour in New York City.
A candle named after a plant that never touches the wax
Kush launched as the scent that made Boy Smells famous. The name did a lot of work. People assumed the jar held something illegal, or at least something grown.
It holds fragrance oil. The cannabis reference is an accord, which is perfumer language for a blend of materials that add up to one recognizable smell. A leather accord has no cowhide in it. A rain accord has no rain.
So the honest answer to "is there weed in this" is no, and Boy Smells states it on the product page. That still leaves the bigger question open, and it is the one nobody checks: what the fragrance is dissolved in, and what happens to it when you set it on fire.
What builds a green, herbal smell when there is no plant involved
Cannabis smells the way it does because of terpenes. Those are aroma compounds found across the plant world. Myrcene shows up in hops and gives that damp, earthy weight. Limonene comes off citrus peel and lifts the top. Linalool is the soft floral edge you get from lavender. Beta-caryophyllene brings the peppery, slightly spicy back end.
None of those are exclusive to cannabis. A perfumer can source them from other botanicals or from lab-made molecules that are chemically identical, then stack them until your nose says "that plant." That is the whole trick.
Grab a handful of green stems off a hedge an hour after rain and crush them in your fist. That bitter, sappy, almost sour smell on your fingers has a name in perfumery: galbanum. It is one of the loudest green materials there is, and it is the opening of our Touch Grass beeswax candle, which runs galbanum and split fig skin over blackcurrant, then lands on cedarwood, amber, and tonka bean. If the green, resinous side of Kush is what you actually like, that is the part you are chasing.
The note list tells you the top half of the story
Boy Smells lists Kush with rhubarb, almond, eucalyptus, suede, tulip, amber, and cedarwood, wrapped around the cannabis accord. Earlier listings also called out white musk.
Read that list again and you can see how it is built. Rhubarb and eucalyptus handle the sharp green opening. Suede and white musk soften the middle so it reads like skin instead of a garden. Amber and cedarwood hold the base down so the whole thing does not evaporate in twenty minutes.
A note list is useful. It tells you what the candle wants to smell like. It tells you nothing about what you are breathing while it burns, because notes describe the fragrance oil only, and fragrance oil is a small share of what is in the jar.
So what is actually in the jar
Three things, in every candle ever made. Wax, a wick, and fragrance. That is it.
For Kush today, the wax is a soy blend, farmed in the US, described by the brand as vegan and non-GMO. That is a change. The original version was poured in a coconut and beeswax blend, and the reformulation was made to improve scent throw and cut down on tunneling and soot. The fragrance is a proprietary blend, so the full list of materials is not published. That is standard across the industry and not unique to Boy Smells. The vessel is glass, meant to be reused or recycled.
Here is why I opened with the wax rather than the notes. The fragrance oil in a candle is usually a single-digit share of the jar. The wax is nearly everything else. Every hour the candle burns, the wax is what is being vaporized and pulled into the air of your room. If you only audit one line on a label, audit that one.
Why the wax decides more than the note list does
Soy wax is a real improvement on the old default. It comes from soybean oil, hydrogenated until it holds a solid shape at room temperature. It burns cooler than petroleum wax and it is renewable. A candle poured in a straight soy blend, like the current Kush, is a cleaner starting point than most of what sits on a drugstore shelf.
The word that needs watching in this category is "blend." Plenty of candles labeled soy are soy mixed with paraffin, because paraffin is cheap and it carries fragrance well. The label does not always say which.
Follow paraffin backward and you end up somewhere specific. It starts as crude oil. Refiners split the crude into fractions, pull heavy slack wax out of the lubricating oil cut, then de-oil it and bleach it white. What comes out the other end is a petroleum refining byproduct, sold as candle wax. Research has found that burning it releases benzene, toluene, and formaldehyde into indoor air. Your concern about that is legitimate, and I am not going to talk you out of it.
Beeswax skips that entire chain. Honeybees make it from wax glands to build comb, beekeepers cap it off during honey harvest, and it gets filtered and poured. Nothing is cracked, refined, or bleached. It is a single ingredient, and it is the oldest candle material we have, going back to around 5,000 BCE.
The word doing the most work on any candle label
"Fragrance" is one word that can stand in for dozens of materials. Some of those materials are phthalates, used to make a scent stick around longer, and parabens, used as preservatives. A brand can list "fragrance" and disclose nothing further, legally.
This is the part that catches people who already switched away from paraffin. They buy a plant wax candle, they still get that heavy, headachy feeling by hour two, and they blame the wax. Often it is the fragrance load.
Every MBur candle uses phthalate-free fragrance oil and no chemical dyes. The wax is 100% beeswax, one ingredient, no blend. The wick is wood, which burns with a wide flat flame and a low crackle, and carries no metal core. Those are the four lines on a label worth checking, and they are the four we can answer without hedging.
Will a cleaner candle still fill the room?
This is the real objection, and it is fair. Kush has a reputation for a big throw. Some reviewers say it is too big for a small bathroom. Nobody switches to a cleaner candle in order to smell nothing.
"This scent has me in a chokehold. I burn it in my room and my living room and it fills my space SOOOOO nicely. I've tried quite a few scents from them and they all have different vibes and gives you something unique....and they all smell amazing. Theres nothing I hate more than a candle that can't fill the room and baby this is NOT that. This candle permeates every corner of the room. Cant say enough about how impressed I am with this company."
Tiffany Gordon, verified buyer
If the cool herbal side of Kush is what you keep coming back to, the closest thing on our shelf is Sunday Reset, built on eucalyptus, clove, cedar, patchouli, and vanilla. The first breath is cold and sharp, like winter air. Then clove goes dark and sweet, cedar comes in dry underneath, and it settles warm. It shares the eucalyptus and cedarwood spine that gives Kush its structure, without the suede.
How beeswax, soy, and paraffin actually compare
| Wax | Where it comes from | Processing | What it does in your room |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beeswax (MBur, 100%) | Made by honeybees, collected as a byproduct of honey harvesting | Filtered, then poured. No chemical processing. | Highest melting point of the common waxes, so it burns slow. Our 80-hour size runs 80 hours at $65, which works out to about 81 cents an hour of burn time. No paraffin soot. Naturally hypoallergenic. |
| Soy | Soybean oil | Hydrogenated to hold a solid shape | Renewable and cooler burning than petroleum wax. Softer, so it burns faster than beeswax. Often sold as a blend, and the blend partner is not always named. |
| Paraffin | Crude oil | Refined, de-oiled, bleached | Cheap, holds a lot of fragrance, and releases benzene, toluene, and formaldehyde while burning. |
One more spec worth knowing. Beeswax burns with a light spectrum closer to natural sunlight than other waxes, which is why the flame reads warmer and yellower against a wall.
But I like how strong Kush is
Then buy the size that matches your room and stop there. A candle that overwhelms a small bathroom is doing exactly what it was built to do in a living room. Throw is a function of fragrance load and how much melted wax surface you have going, so a smaller jar in a small space fixes most of it.
What I would not do is chase throw by buying whatever smells loudest through the lid. Cold throw and hot throw are different animals. Several of our reviewers say the same thing Breann B. did about our bestseller: she could barely smell it in the jar, then lit it and changed her mind.
But mine tunnels down the middle
Almost always the first burn. Wax has a memory. Whatever diameter the pool reaches the first time you light it is the diameter it will keep returning to, so if you blow it out after forty minutes you have taught it to burn narrow.
Give the first burn enough time for the melted wax to reach the glass all the way around. In a jar candle that usually takes two to four hours. After that, trim the wick short before every light, and cap each burn at around four hours so the glass does not overheat.
If you get headaches or feel tight-chested around scented candles, air the room out and keep a door open while it burns. Anyone managing asthma, allergies, or any respiratory condition should follow their doctor's guidance on what belongs in their air, and a candle is never the answer to a medical problem.
"I love these candles. No headache or feeling nauseous like the Bath & Body candles with all the extra chemicals. In addition, I love the package and how carefully everything was wrapped. Im saving the wrapping paper to utilize during the xmas holiday."
Jason H., verified buyer
Frequently asked questions
Does Boy Smells Kush have actual weed in it?
No. Boy Smells states that the candle contains zero cannabis-related ingredients, including CBD and THC, and that any cannabis reference describes an olfactive accord only. If you want the green herbal character without the name attached, the galbanum and fig opening in Touch Grass is the closest thing we pour.
What creates the cannabis smell if there is no cannabis?
Terpenes. Myrcene, limonene, linalool, and beta-caryophyllene all appear across many plants, and a perfumer can stack them until the blend reads as cannabis. The same technique builds a leather accord or a rain accord. You can see it working in the cedar and clove structure of Sunday Reset, where no single note is doing the job alone.
Is beeswax really better than soy?
For burn time, yes, and the reason is physical. Beeswax has the highest melting point of the common candle waxes, so the same amount of wax lasts longer. Soy is softer and burns faster. Beeswax is also a single ingredient with no hydrogenation step, which is why every candle in our range lists exactly one wax on the label.
How long do these actually burn?
The number on the label is the number. Portia Darby wrote that her candle "burned slowly and was exactly the amount of hours the company said it would burn." Our sizes run 40 hours at $32, 55 hours at $37, and 80 hours at $65.
Why a wooden wick instead of cotton?
A wooden wick burns with a wide, flat flame, which pulls the melt pool out toward the glass instead of straight down. It also crackles, quietly, the way a fireplace does at the far end of a room. There is no metal core in it.
What to do with all this
Kush is a well-built fragrance with no cannabis in it, poured now in a US-farmed soy blend, and the note list tells you the scent while the wax line tells you what you are breathing. Read the wax line first on any candle, then the fragrance line, then decide.
Before you buy anything, read The Ultimate Guide to Bee-autiful Candle Care and get the first burn right. It costs you nothing and it is the single biggest thing standing between you and a tunneled jar.
Then start with the 40-hour Touch Grass at $32, because it gives you the green, resinous side of Kush in a single-ingredient wax for the price of testing a scent rather than committing to one. Emotionally, it is the smell of a garden an hour after rain, which is a good thing to have going in a room at the end of a long day. Logically, if you love it, the 80-hour size at $65 comes out to about 81 cents per hour of burn time, and it is hard to beat that on a candle you can read the entire ingredient list for. Our reviewers keep saying the same thing Paige did: "I won't buy other candles anymore, they're just that good."
One plain reason to do it now instead of later: the next candle you light is going to be burning for hours in a room you sleep in, and it may as well be one whose wax you can name.
Shop the full MBur beeswax candle collection
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