How to Develop New Candle Designs
Developing new candles can be a massive pain in the neck.
Are you sick of candles turning out wrong anytime you try out a new wax? Is the fragrance giving you trouble? Are your results inconsistent?
A basic candle is simple to explain. Wax, fragrance, and a little heat all head towards a lovely container with a wick. Building a robust system for making sure all the ingredients play nice with each other every time is another discussion.
You need a bulletproof system for creating candles if you want to build a serious candle collection for your product line or brand. It’s not complicated, but it takes some serious time, effort, and personal investment to build high quality candles that meet your standard of excellence.
To reach that summit means a lot of pouring, curing, testing, and repeating until you clear the initial horizon in sweet victory. The biggest enemy in the process is impatience followed by money (sometimes). This guide is a strategy for optimizing your process to efficiently catch and account for all factors that can negatively impact your candle development.
The theory is this: if you can easily isolate your candle problems to a single variable, you can intelligently correct instead of drowning in a sea of “maybes”. This type of process takes time, but pays off massive dividends in the end.
Candle design is a science and art that must be respected. Misbehaving supplies, like waxes and fragrances, is annoying, but expected. It’s normal to have everything figured out until a new batch of wax shows up and makes you question everything.
This guide is a step-by-step algorithm for designing a new candle for your collection. Be warned! Achieving this requires great patience, persistence, and a whole lotta moxie!
1. Determine your constant variables
Make a list of the variables in your new candle design that won’t change.
Your list should include:
- Wax blend – if you are going to test a new hybrid mix, this might not actually be a constant variable.
- Container/mold specifications – the container you plan to use. If you are going to offer the same “flavor” in multiple scents, only include one of the containers. Your wick selection will most likely be different for each unique container, even if all other factors are the same.
Items like fragrance oil and color dye can be completely modified later in the process (step 4). You may find the performance or stability of either causes too many issues. The algorithm allows you to quickly and easily identify if they are the cause for problems in your candle.
2. Determine a wax-specific Temperature Management Plan
A Temperature Management Plan defines the “rules” for heating and pouring your wax. Every major temperature you care to track, including environment settings, should be included. The algorithm determines the most stable temperatures by trial and error.
To test a Temperature Management Plan:
- Prepare four wick-less containers – even though a wick can affect the final profile of a candle (air can travel through the wick during curing), it’s effect is mostly a non-factor in this process. Feel free to use wicks, but removing them each iteration can be a headache.
- Build an initial Temperature Management Plan
- Max temp
- Room temp
- Room humidity
- Pour temp
- Curing method (open air, cardboard box, environment chamber, etc)
- Melt wax according to plan and pour into containers
- Do not include fragrance or dye
- Review the curing profile
- Surface imperfections?
- Adhesion issues?
- Craters below surface?
Repeat until candle cures without issue (or to your own satisfaction). Every following candle should be poured the same way. Revisit this step if you suspect problems with the Temperature Management Plan.
Validate each new batch of wax against these results by following the above steps. Develop a new Temperature Management Plan if wax from a new lot doesn’t meet the same results. Many candle product lines suffer from assuming the same behavior from their wax
Accounts for problems associated with temperatures and the wax.
3. Wick test the naked wax
Now for the trickiest part of candle design: wick testing.
This part of candle development requires a significant amount of patience. You’re going to make one or more batches of candles to determine the initial wick size for the naked wax.
This stage is optional, but recommended. You’ll be creating candles with no fragrance oil or dye to lock in the base wick that behaves with your wax and temperatures.
Fragrance oils have such a variety that determining the root of a problem can be difficult when fragrance is present without the testing information this step provides. Additionally, fragrance oil is expensive! Your test is more cost effective without fragrance – wax can be easily reused. Only skip this stage of the algorithm if you are confident or rich (or experienced).
For your naked wax wick test:
- Prepare 3-5 containers with various wicks. Not sure where to start? Check out The Flaming Candle’s guide here.
- Pour into each container using the Temperature Management Plan from above. Do not include fragrance oil or color dye!
- Cure each candle. Properly cure them in the right environment and for the proper amount of time. As a general guide:
- Paraffin wax – 24 hours
- Soy/Coconut/Palm wax – 14 days
- Beeswax – 24 hours – 1 week
- Burn test all the way or until failure.
- Burn in four-hour increments until completed
- Fail for any of the following reasons (at your discretion):
- Excessive mushroom formation on wick
- High soot levels
- Container temperature is hotter than cup of coffee
- Flame is flickering without draft
- Tunneling
- Make sure to test in a draft-free area
Repeat with new wicks until you have 1-3 different wicks that pass the test. The largest return on your investment here is the ability to intelligently design new candles that share a common container and wax – you already know which wick type and size to start with!
This stage of testing allows you to identify issues that may be introduced by fragrance or dye.
4. Add fragrance oil and dye
Wax can only hold so much extra stuff, like fragrance, additives, or colors. Everything in the candle affects the burn and directly impacts the wick.
The wick you found to work well in your wax, container, and Temperature Management Plan is probably going to be too small – there is more complexity to the fluid being drawn into the flame. This is not a surprise!
In this stage you’ll determine the impact of fragrance oil on your design and tune your wick accordingly (which usually means a size or two larger than what you found worked in step 4).
Once you’ve determined the fragrance load, additives, and color plan (if any):
- Create one candles for each wick from above, one candle with a wick one size larger. This is the recommended starting point, but feel free to include any number of additional sizes in this stage to your satisfaction.
- Label the containers
- Take good notes
- Cure candles. It’s easy to get impatient here.
- Paraffin wax – 24 hours
- Soy/Coconut/Palm wax – 14 days
- Beeswax – 24 hours – 1 week
- Burn test all the way or until failure.
- Burn in four-hour increments until completed
- Fail for any of the following reasons (at your discretion):
- Excessive mushroom formation on wick
- High soot levels
- Container temperature is hotter than cup of coffee
- Flame is flickering without draft
- Tunneling
- Make sure to test in a draft-free area
- Any issues are (probably) the additives. Variability in the burn test should be limited only by what you introduced in this step.
Tune your wick selection or additive strengths according to your findings and repeat.
This generates the wick/fragrance/wax design appropriate for the initial cure length.
5. Test for extended curing conditions
It’s likely your candle will see it’s share of shelf life at some point. A lot of natural waxes will continue to crystallize and harden over the course of their life (including after they burn), therefore it’s good practice to test burn candle designs that make it past the first 4 steps to understand the impact time has on your design.
At a minimum, you should test for the expected time period from when you pour to when you sell the candle.
For example, if you’re going to prepare your candles two months ahead of a craft fair, you’ll want to run a “two month” burn test to make sure the candle performs as expected. Some waxes, like paraffin
- Pour 3-5 for long-term testing
- Burn test at the following (suggested) benchmarks
- 4 weeks
- 6 weeks
- 3 months
- 6 months
- Your business plan will dictate a lot of how you position your company and inventory, though not all factors may be accounted for
This step is more critical for waxes prone to polymorphism (such as soy, coconut, and palm). Accounts for the life-cycle of your candle – a different wick may be required if you need more shelf life.
6. Refine blueprint for new wax lots
When you re-order wax, even if it’s the same kind, it can sometimes ship with a few minor differences from your previous batch. Factors like:
- Storage conditions
- Temperature fluctuations (partial crystallization)
- Manufacturing irregularities
- Moisture
Moisture is especially difficult to deal with without a framework to identify it as a culprit. Wax is only sold after passing QA, but there is generally enough wiggle room to introduce slight variations of your wax.
If you suspect a higher moisture content, try “tempering” your wax by holding it at the max temperature for longer. Alternatively, melt and re-harden the wax one full cycle before using it for candle making.
To validate your new batch is what you expect for your candles, repeat steps 1-3 and verify it’s behaving correctly. If the wax isn’t the same, work through the algorithm as it makes sense to re-design for the “new” wax.
Accounts for changes to the wax source.
Conclusion
It’s a simple step process with huge dividends. Sets you apart and imparts knowledge of your product to yourself.
The algorithm laid out is simple, but involves time, money, resources, and patience. Take inspiration from it to design a candle development process that works for your standards if the above is too involved or too lacking in any way.
The important takeaway is this: the greatest candle makers have systems that can adapt to any circumstance and do not rely on suppliers or equipment to stay constant.
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