Your Guide to Shopping This Week's Diptyque Sample Sale

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After a month of fancy candle uncertainty, you can rest easy tonight knowing that tomorrow will bring the Diptyque sample sale...or can you? As past shoppers can attest, people go nuts—nuts—for discounted products from the French brand, and the feeling of shopping this sale can rival that panicky feeling you get when you end up on Fifth Avenue with some out-of-town friends on a Saturday afternoon.

But your trip to C21 Edition—the sale's new host—doesn't need to be an emotional rollercoaster. Based on information gathered at previous sales, here's nine pieces of advice you can heed to potentially make your life easier (and much better-smelling).

· Take tomorrow morning off, or just plan working an hour or two later to make up for coming in late. Expect a hefty line to form well before the sale starts, meaning you may need to wait out in the cold for a bit even after the doors open. The sale host let people in early in 2013, but there's never a guarantee for that.

· There might be a chance for you to cut the line, according to last year's commenters. You've got a good chance if you're one of the first to show up with your baby (but don't be, like, the eighth person with a baby. It gets old.). Also, saying you have "circulation problems" will only get you a hashtag-fail.

Last year's snowy line.

· Don't want to deal with this mess? Grab a line sitter. They arrived just before 5am last year, and they're eagerly awaiting your call this time around.

· Don't believe everything that the people ahead of you say, as our line reporter cruelly learned last year. Less than an hour after the sale began (and while she was still waiting to get in), "a woman walked out and said there were no more candles. And she was lying because another shopper just walked out and said there were candles left. What a mean trick to play on frostbitten people."

· Once you get inside, find what you like and grab it, and then browse the rest of the offerings later. Just a couple hours into last year's sale, popular scents for standard ($35) and mini ($15) candles had already been claimed.

· Be ready to find holiday product—lots of it. By the end of the second day last year, holiday scents were all that was left in the candle department. Hey, it seems like the holiday season comes earlier and earlier every year, right? Just think of it as getting a jumpstart on preparation.

· There could be yet another price increase—2014 saw the standard candle price rise from $30 to $35. For a full rundown of prices at last year's sale, head here.

· Be ready for a deluge of merchandise, restocked whenever. More Baies candles could be plopped down on the tables in the middle of the day, so if you see a sales associate coming out of the back rooms with large boxes, stop what you're doing and look there.

· Some sales are famous for their last-minute discounts at the very end of the sale, and Diptyque is most definitely not one of them. Last year's sale didn't even open on its scheduled third and final day because they had already sold out.

TL;DR? Set an early alarm for tomorrow.