Five Things You Can Do To Make Better Candles
Improving your candle making technique is a process that never really ends.
After all, the craft has so many different dials and knobs you can turn to influence the result, and each design potentially requires a unique approach. In this article we’ll break down mathematically how complex the craft is as well as five strategies you can use in your own process (if you aren’t already)
Your Process
Every candle maker approaches the craft with a unique set of tools, techniques, and supplies. In other words, the technique you apply using your tools in your environment is called your process.
Ideally, you’ll design a process and improve it over time to produce excellent candles that:
- Have smooth tops
- Require minimal to zero maintenance, post-pour (such as heat guns)
- Adhere to your vessel well (in the case of container candles)
- Optimize the amount of time you require to make it beautiful
But anyone who has taken the craft seriously understands there is more to making a candle than simply mixing, pouring, and burning. A properly made candle has many factors that impact its safety and performance.
Fortunately, we can use simple arithmetic to break down the many different options.
The Incredibly Simple Math
If you want to find out how many different combinations of something there are, just multiply the selections together.
Dinner Menu Example
If you ordered one appetizer, one entree, and one dessert from the following menu:
| Appetizer | 5 options |
| Entree | 3 options |
| Dessert | 4 options |
The total possible combination of these is the product of all the options. In our example, this means:
Dinner Combinations: 5 x 3 x 4 = 60 total options!
Okay, but what does this have to do with candle making?
Candle “Menu” Example
Simply put, we can apply the same math to all the options a candle maker has for approaching a design. We can grossly simplify a process by mapping out the following choices you have when making a candle, kind of like building a dinner menu (but for wax):
| Element | Options | Estimated Total |
|---|---|---|
| Preheating Containers | Preheat the container or don’t preheat (more common with glass vessels) |
2 |
| Pour Temperature | When to transfer the wax blend into a mold or container. You can literally pour as high or low as you can manage to get your wax to behave, but we’ll simplify the total. | 5 |
| Tinfoil Wrapping | To wrap, or not to wrap in tinfoil. Some say this is a secret sauce for excellent candles (but still spend time heat gunning the top) | 2 |
| Room Temperature | Creating your candle in a hot, normal, or cooler room. | 3 |
| Cooling Rate | How quickly does the wax harden after you pour in the container? Fast, normal, or slow. | 3 |
| Max Wax Temperature | Different schools of thought on whether you should raise your wax to 185°F (85°C) or keep it low (hint: always raise it to at least 185°F) | 2 |
| Humidity | Creating and curing in a low, average, or high humidity. Some climates make it unreasonable to maintain a certain humidity, which limits flexibility in this factor. However, humidity likely doesn’t impact finished candle profile too much. | 3 |
| Fragrance Oil Mix Temperature | When should you mix your fragrance oil into the wax? We’ll simplify this and say, “hot” or “cold”. | 2 |
| Curing Conditions | For simplicity’s sake, we’ll say you either cure in a temperature controlled environment or the ambient room conditions. | 2 |
Using the same logic as before:
Total Estimated Options = 4,320 (multiplying all the totals together)
A Needle In A Haystack?
That’s insane… and we haven’t even talked about the variables in supply and equipment choices!
Truthfully, some of those options are more reasonable to pursue than others. After all, who is building a temperature and humidity-controlled chamber to cure their candles in? Some businesses might, but smaller operations likely don’t.
The other good news is that out of those 4,000+ ways to make a candle, you can make awesome candles using multiple approaches. Candle making isn’t finding a needle in a haystack: more than one way works (most of the time).
As you survey the options, you may be wondering where to start with all the complexity. Here are five different strategies you can consider for improving your process
Five Process Improvement Strategies
One | Start With the Suppliers Recommendations
If you’re just starting out with a new wax, wick, fragrance, etc and have nothing to base your first candle on, find the supplier (or manufacturer) recommendations and follow it to a tee.
Keep your room temperature around 70°F (21°C) and a reasonable humidity level, and create the candle.
Why? Even if the candle turns out horrible, you can track exactly where you started with your inputs. Every following candle process should react to this one, with an adjustment to one or two factors.
Knowing your starting point gives you a baseline from which you can try future adjustments.
Two | Make Easy Adjustments First
You might find it more comforting to go crazy with changes if the first batch turns out poorly, but you’ll probably find your rhythm more easily if you move a little slower.
This typically involves making micro adjustments, one at a time.
While it might seem counter intuitive to make small changes one at a time, it’s actually more beneficial. Small changes made one at a time allows you to expose the change that actually made a difference. If you make a lot of changes from batch to batch, you may never know which ones actually helped, and could potentially miss it if one of the other adjustments counteracts the progress.
That’s a complicated way to say don’t throw spaghetti at the wall and wait for something to stick. Track your changes with a good notes template, and keep trucking.
Here are three of the easiest adjustments to make in your process that tend to yield more favorable outcomes:
- Pouring your wax at a cooler temperature
- Changing a single wick size or series
- Cooling the candle(s) more slowly (in an oven, cardboard box, or warm room)
Three | If Something Works, Prove It
While making candles you’ll usually end up with something incredible eventually, but is it because of your recent adjustments or did you get lucky?
The theory behind this trick is to validate to yourself that your process actually produces successful candles most of the time. Simply repeat exactly what you did to make sure it works.
It’s that easy. Check that you end up with smooth tops and crater-free candles. To check for craters, use a skewer, pen, or your finger to push through the surface. If you feel the resistance to your pressure vanish, it’s an air pocket (crater).
Many times, candles that have smooth tops can suffer from craters under the surface! If you burn a candle with craters, the symptoms show up like tunneling but with a much smaller radius and much quicker sinking.
Four | Respect Your Wax
While you may target a perfectly smooth, crater-free candle on the first pour every time some waxes just weren’t designed for that.
Take soy wax, for example. Soy wax is polymorphic, meaning it forms irregular, random crystals in response to time and changes in temperature. This behavior causes frosting as well as bumpy tops.
By it’s very nature, soy wax wants to misbehave and have rough tops. Manufacturers work different levels of magic into their blends to try and make the wax more candle friendly, but the soy wax creation process follows the same path as margarine.
Vegetable wax is naturally irregular, so if you find yourself regularly applying a heat gun to your soy wax candles that’s completely normal.
Professional candle makers, including the larger shops, typically add a more stable wax (like paraffin) to their blend to reduce errant behavior and cut down on overhead. The point of respecting your wax is to roll with the punches and remember the nature of the beast you’re trying to tame.
Similarly, many paraffin waxes require a second pour for a smooth top. Frustrated that you can’t get it all in one go? That’s not your fault, and your process won’t necessarily fix that. It’s just how the wax is.
Most waxes have their nuances. Figure them out and don’t stress over “fixing” it. Just make good and safe candles.
Five | Learn From Failure
What is failure? True failure is giving up when the going gets tough.
When your candle doesn’t turn out well, that isn’t failure. It’s a non-success. Non-successes are fundamentally different because they’re an entry in your “how to NOT make a candle” book.
Thomas Edison stated that he found ten thousand ways that don’t work for making a light bulb.
Ten thousand.
Can you imagine how different the world would be if he had given up after 9,999?
Each non-success taught him a lesson in light bulbs and brought him that much closer to finding what he needed. Similarly, you should use each experience as feedback towards your ultimate destination.
Data points.
Repetitions in technique.
Just because the candle doesn’t work like you expect, or look as pretty as you need, doesn’t mean you wasted your time. Rather, you made an investment in your craft and skill. You can’t buy that – you have to live it.
So whatever you’re doing in candle making, take good notes. They’re the best teacher and they don’t require you to remember what you did to produce a certain outcome. Notes are the gateway for mapping your inputs and outputs on either side of your candle making machine (that’s you and your processes!).
So don’t give up when things go sideways. Stay with it, and you’ll bring light on your ten thousandth candle, if not before.
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