Essential Oils for Candle Making
Despite what you might hear, you can use essential oils for candle making but they require a more advanced approach than a synthetic fragrance.
Understanding the origin and behavior of them is absolutely critical if you’re going to successfully integrate essential oils into your product line, or just make them at home.
Essential oils are appealing to many markets, from cosmetics to food and pharmaceuticals.
Why?
They contain a variety of properties (depending on the plant) useful for various product goals.
All essential oils come from different plant parts:
- Flowers and flower buds
- Leaves
- Rhizomes (rooty stem)
- Seeds
- Fruits
- Wood & bark
A few of the most popular oils and their sources are:
| Essential Oil | Plant Part |
|---|---|
| Lavender | Flower spikes |
| Coriander | Seeds |
| Eucalyptus | Leaves |
| Cinnamon | Bark |
| Lemon | Rind (peel) |
| Ginger | Rhizomes |
No matter the plant part, oil comes through a distillation process.
Heat and steam are passed through the plant parts to release oil. If you have an ear to the fragrance market you might also hear about absolute oils, which come from plant parts through solvent extraction instead of steam distillation.
Some essential oils are more expensive because it’s harder to extract oil or requires more material.
For example, rose essential oil requires 2,000 pounds of rose petals to create a single pound. Eucalyptus essential oil stretches much further and is cheaper as a result – you can even make it at home.
Keep reading to learn the practical elements of using essential oils for candle making and how to optimize them in your product line.
Essential Oils Performance in Candles
Candle makers mainly integrate essential oils in candles for scent. After all, what good is a candle if it doesn’t smell good?
Generally speaking, candles made with essential oils have a decent cold throw but struggle with hot throw, regardless of wax. Many suppliers and candle makers in the community express frustration over their inability to achieve a desirable hot throw with essential oils compared to synthetic solutions.
Why is that?
Hot Throw
Strong candle scents come from a balanced system; the flame melts wax into a fluid drawn up through the wick as fuel.
More fuel creates more heat which increases the melt pool size. The flame also regulates the overall temperature of the melt pool in addition to combusting the liquid-to-vapor wax blend to “throw” scent.
High performing candles have wicks perfectly sized to manage the wax blends melt pool temperature and expansion.
Remember, everything added impacts everything added. Essential oils added to a candle change the physical makeup of the wax blend, and just like any other fragrance, perform best in a specific temperature range.
Unfortunately, essential oils aren’t directly engineered for the wide range of temperatures present in a candle because they are extracted from a plant for a variety of uses.
There’s a much higher chance of middle and top notes burning off before they throw if they have high volatility (lower boiling temperatures).
Quality & Degradation
And that’s what’s so interesting about essential oils for candle making – each essential oil is extremely complicated, chemically speaking.
Although each has a characteristic odor, most are made up of potentially hundreds of components that evaporate at different rates.
Ignoring the chemical complexity (and sensitivity), essential oils also vary in quality. The strongest smelling candles use a high quality fragrance source, whether it’s synthetic or natural.
It’s quality, derived from the chemical composition, depends on:
- Plant health
- Growth stage
- Habitat
- Harvest time
- Processing and storage conditions after distillation
…all of which can swing the quality pendulum.
Finally, essential oils degrade over time and from exposure to increased heat and light. These factors trigger autoxidation in the formula and negatively impact fragrance quality in candles.
Candles operate in relatively high heat and light which doesn’t always play well with essential oil quality.
This could be why some people have an acceptable throw in their first few burns but can’t smell the candle at all during subsequent burns.
This doesn’t mean using essential oils for candle making is a complete waste!
They’re just more sensitive to the primary aspects of a candle and therefore generally require lower-temperature systems.
Safety Concerns
Using essential oils safely requires your attention on two fronts:
Combustion
The impact of synthetic fragrance oils has been scrutinized by the industry for safety before, but what about essential oils?
Generally speaking, there aren’t any health concerns for combustion of essential oils.
Although some are known irritants or allergens for various people, the final product used in a candle is typically not concentrated enough to be concerning.
Essential oils with lower flash points need special care when transporting and should be kept away from open flames. Otherwise the flash point is only relevant in transporting and shipping the un-candled oil and should not be considered when making candles.
Essential oils with flash points below 141 °F (60.5 °C) are considered a HAZMAT Class 3 Flammable liquid.
More on that below.
Handling
Although originating from nature, essential oils aren’t always safe for contact by humans which is a bit ironic considering many people use them for health benefits.
Remember that essential oils are a highly concentrated version of the essence found in one plant, so take care in handling the individual oils to avoid contact or inhalation.
If you’re selling candles, customers ought to know what ingredients are in the product in case they have sensitivities, but this is your choice to make of course.
Essential Oils versus Fragrance Oil
The ultimate debate involves using synthetic fragrance oil instead of essential oils for scenting candles, but are these two items really in competition?
Not really.
There’s a clear market for “natural” candles around the world, which leaves no choice for candle makers serving this demographic.
They have to use essential oils or no oils at all, and commonly use vegetable-based wax like soy or coconut.
To this particular market, it often doesn’t matter how strong the candle smells because the promise of what the candle is made of usually trumps the candle’s performance.
This is good news for candle makers in that market because they can focus less on high-performance candles and more on their ingredients.
If you’re out to create the strongest smelling, best looking candle, you probably don’t want to mess around with essential oils unless you have a lot of time and money to spend on them.
They bring complications in temperature management and a much higher price tag than synthetic “equivalents”.
For example, eucalyptus and peppermint essential oils cost around $25 for one pound whereas the synthetic equivalent is only $9.
Considering that fragrance is the most expensive part of candles, the cost of research and development becomes dramatically higher for essential oil candles with minimal promise of strong performance and long shelf life.
Synthetic fragrance oils are engineered for candle making, which is what makes them so alluring.
They often include essential oils as an ingredient, but also have a variety of different substances meant to enhance the more desirable aspects of fragrance in candle wax.
An additional benefit is the wide variety of flavors you can’t replicate with essential oils.
If you’re a complete beginner to the craft, start with synthetic fragrance oil to understand the process and technique. When you have a system for creating safe, well-performing candles then you can transition into essential oils.
Building a framework for candle making is imperative to success.
Conclusion
Essential oils are highly sought after by a lot of people.
Though they come with a steep and expensive learning curve, they’re not impossible to master. Unfortunately, many people start learning candle making and quit shortly after when their essential oil-based candles don’t work well and they don’t understand why.
For the most part, creating an acceptable essential oil candle that burns safely and throws well throughout it’s life requires:
- “Softer” wicks that burn at a lower temperature without tunneling
- More test iterations and good note taking to figure out the right balance
- Sourcing essential oils from a good supplier with relatively high quality
- Balanced volatility characteristics in your wax blend
- Attention given to the ingredients and oils used for safety
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