u/sargonl

Hi crazy candle lovers,

I’ve been lurking on here for a while and I thought I’d share a bit of advice on candles, luxury or otherwise, from someone who’s worked in the candle industry for over a decade.

I’ve seen a few posts here and on other subreddits asking things like “why is my candle sooting?”, “why is it tunnelling?” or just generally why a candle isn’t burning very well.

If you’re consistently getting a bad result from a candle, there are a few things it could be.

One is simply where you’re burning it, cause I’ve seen people burn candles next to fireplaces and wonder why they’re melting really quickly, or next to a draughty window and wonder why the flame is flickering around and sooting. Fans, vents, open windows, heat sources etc can all make quite a big difference to how a candle burns, slowing or speeding it up dramatically.

But if you’re having the same problem repeatedly, especially with the same candle from the same brand, then there’s a pretty good chance it’s actually a formulation issue.

A candle is basically a combination of wax, fragrance and wick, plus the container if it’s a container candle. There can obviously be other things in there too, like dyes, UV stabilisers, wax softeners and gardeners and so on and getting all of those things to work together properly is what candle testing is for.

A lot of candle development is trial and error. You make a candle, burn it, change the wick, burn another one, change the fragrance percentage, try a different wax blend, burn another one etc. Sometimes it takes loads of versions before you get something you’re happy with. I used to use all the failed samples in my home since there were “free”

The other thing that people outside the industry probably don’t realise is that the raw materials themselves can change. Usually we’re told as materials change, but sometimes not, quick anecdote, I used to buy gold lacquer for candles from a German company and we did a Christmas candle dipped in the gold lacquer with a fragrance inspired by the winter forest in “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe”, I loved it, and then one year when dipping the new batch of candles for that year, the gold was matte, chalky, not shiny, and just looked like a dusty yellow. We found out that the company had changed their formula after we had already dipped a bunch and were waiting for them to dry. We found another supplier and in the end after a lot of last minute stress all was well.

Wax manufacturers change or tweak waxes. Hardness can change, melting point can change, oil content can change. Wicks can change as they’re engineered to the amount of thread counts in them. Fragrance formulas can change as ingredients become restricted or regulations are updated.

And sometimes a relatively small change can affect the way the finished candle burns, so even if a candle was tested properly when it was originally developed, manufacturers really should be keeping an eye on it when materials change. We usually test batches as they’re manufactured to ensure consistency.

If a candle is repeatedly sooting, tunnelling, producing a massive flame, drowning its wick or just generally burning badly, then something isn’t right.

That doesn’t automatically mean the brand is terrible, and it doesn’t necessarily mean nobody tested it, but it can mean the particular combination of wax, wick, fragrance and container isn’t working as well as it should. Also many brands now don’t make their own candles, and I can point at some companies that manufacture for a lot of the luxury brands if anyone is curious, but it’ll be said very quietly in the dark corner of a bar where no one can hear.

And yes, sometimes it does mean corners were cut during testing.

I mainly wanted to post this because I see people blaming themselves quite a lot when a candle burns badly. Sometimes it is where or how you’re burning it, but sometimes the candle just isn’t very well formulated.

Happy to answer any candle questions if anyone has them. I can probably get fairly nerdy about waxes, wicks, fragrance loads, tunnelling, sooting etc if anyone is interested.

This is a confession that has been weighing on my heart for a decade and I’m ready to free myself of this burden.

When I was young and fresh and starting up a small candle business with my husband who was (and is) the best candle maker I know, I have never seen him unable to turn a (frequently pushed) odd design or idea into a working candle that doesn’t tunnel or turn into a fireball.

We made a scented candle that had a black base.

I wasn’t the candle maker, so I didn’t know how it worked, but I also handled our social media where I got an Instagram question about how to make black candles that didn’t tunnel or snuff out from the heavy dye needed that clogged the wick.

I’d never seen our black candles struggle, but I think it was because the rest of the undyed wax was diluting it. I made a quick unscented black wax candle in a glass, lit it and then sent a photo to the sweet candlemaker asking how to make it work, saying something simple like, just use a bigger wick and it should work.

A few hours later I saw that the example I’d made had tunnelled and snuffed itself out.

I didn’t tell the candle maker on Instagram.

The candle gods will pass their judgement on me in due course, but if you’re out there, I’m sorry, it took us years to figure it out ourselves.

I’m absolutely a lurker usually here, but I see so many posts about frosting and how to fix it, so I thought I’d give away the easiest fix I know for it.

I’ve worked with waxes for years in both recycling them and manufacturing candles and this comes up constantly, so thought I’d add my tips from experience.

Frosting is just crystallisation, as wax cools, the molecules realign and tiny crystals form on the surface. This can happen to most types of readily available waxes. Blends are always getting better, but it still happens.

Slow ambient cooling, which most of us use by default, actually gives this more time to happen, so it’s almost unavoidable with pure soy. Some manufacturers have flash freezing procedures to keep a flat top to their candles, but then other large manufacturers also just use ambient cooling.

The easiest fix by far is blending a couple of different waxes together.

Each wax has a slightly different molecular structure, so they don’t crystallise the same way and mixing them disrupts the process enough that frosting reduces significantly. Even a small addition of coconut wax, vegetable stearin, or a bit of paraffin can make a noticeable difference.

You could go to your perfumer and ask for the fragrance in a different carrier or solvent possibly, but that could be a bigger deal than adding a bit of a different wax to see if that is a quicker fix.