Making candles for vegans and others.
It turns out making candles is easy and fun. You can do it! You’ll need a candy thermometer, a double boiler (with a top pot that you are okay never using for food again), wax (lots of choices, I will discuss more below), wicking material (again, choices from cotton to hemp to wood), something to stabilize and adhere the wick with, something to pour the scented wax into (like a glass jar), essential oils, a clothespin, and about 30-60 minutes. I’m sure you can find a billion videos of how to do this, so I’m not going into every step. Instead, I’ll share what surprised me so you have the inside track on what the videos may not tell you.
Soy vey. Truth be told, I am not a vegan. I enjoyed working with the soy, which melted beautifully, but I am actually more concerned about GMOs than I am about whether it’s okay to use the stuff bees make. I’m sorry about that, vegan friends. I think you guys are great. And I actually love bees and work hard to make an incredible haven for them in my yard. But I feel okay about using their wax. And I might prefer that to soy because, while you cannot get soy wax that is organic, you can get beeswax that is organic. And I am passionate about voting with my dollars for crops that replenish the Earth. So I may eventually shift to beeswax and see how I like working with that.
Fragrance balancing. There’s a science to creating a fragrance for your candles, which is grounded in the concept that a balanced fragrance consists of three elements: a top note, a middle note, and a base note. The top note creates your initial impression—it’s likely what you smell first, but it dissipates more swiftly than the other two scents. Your middle note (sometimes called the heart note) will have a steady presence that emerges more strongly once the top note evaporates. Finally, your base note has a heavier molecule that is slowest to evaporate; this scent lingers even after the candle is blown out. You can search for lists of which fragrances fall into which of the three categories. I personally found that I generally favor top and heart note fragrances over base notes, so I had to improvise to find a combination in which all three categories were represented. For my candles, I chose bergamot (top note), rosemary (heart note), and ginger (base note). I was pleased with the richness and depth I got from playing these three against each other.
Melted is melted. The directions I followed had very specific temperature goals for the wax in the double boiler. After some experimentation, I found I could be quite a bit looser. If it looked clear and melted, it was good to go.
I really enjoyed this project and encourage you to give it a try—or invite you to purchase one of my candles if you’d like to see how mine turned out.