Candle Magic, Part 2 - Candle Care & Upkeep 🕯
Greetings, friends! ✨
I wanted to write a little follow up to my Candle Magic post because I know how important candles are to witches and candle-fanatics, everywhere. I wanted to offer some helpful tips and tricks on candle maintenance and upkeep that can help prolong the lives of your candles, thus ensuring that you make the most out of the money that was spent on them.
At first, I know it might sound silly to imply that there’s more to candle maintenance besides “Light it and make sure to blow it out when you’re done with it to avoid burning your house down.” But in actuality, there are so many little things that we can do in order to help our candles burn cleaner and extend the lives of our candles.
The First Burn?
A candle’s first burn on a new wick can decide the overall life of your candle, and if you aren’t careful, you can actually ruin a candle right off the bat if you aren’t paying attention to it. For a candle’s first burn, you want to make sure that it burns long enough to evenly melt the wax along the entire surface of the candle. This prevents your next few burns from melting and drying the wax unevenly, causing inward tunneling of the wax—thus decreasing your candle’s overall lifespan. Too much tunneling will make it so that the wicks refuse to stay lit, no matter how much you try to burn away the wax that surrounds it. I’ve had a few candles that were ruined almost immediately by this, and it’s so disappointing. It’s often recommended to avoid lighting your new candles until you can dedicate a good chunk of time to allow the whole surface to melt for this exact reason; usually an hour will do the trick to ensure that the wax melts evenly across the entire candle surface.
Other Tips?
As another more obvious pro-tip, you want to make sure that you keep the wax clean from wick trimmings, hair, dust, match sticks that you might use to light the candle, or other unwanted debris that didn’t come embedded in the wax. Many of these fragments are dangerous and can catch fire if the flame hits any of it.
Extinguishing your candle also takes a bit of finesse. It is recommended that a lid or proper candle flame snuffer be used to put the flame out, rather than blowing it out. In doing so, you prevent an unwanted extra smoking or hot wax from splattering up into your face or all over the lip of the jar. It also prevents wax from being moved around to potentially dry and settle unevenly, which can eventually lead to tunneling through more burn/dry cycles. Keep your candles in a safe space at room temperature that avoids direct sunlight when not in use to avoid the candle naturally melting and cooling. Avoid windy or drafty spaces when burning candles, as these two things can decrease your candle’s burn time, cause the wax to melt unevenly (leads to tunneling), and diminish the throw of the candle’s scent if it is a scented one.
Wick trimming is another piece of maintenance you can do to help prolong your candle’s life. You should always trim the wick with either a proper wick trimmer or a pair of sturdy scissors between candle lightings. Keeping the wick approximately 6 millimeters from the wax can help prevent unwanted soot buildup around the lip of the jar, as well as unpleasant “mushrooming” of the wick. “Mushrooming” is when the wick gets too charred and bends over to touch itself or the wax that it is embedded in. Once this happens, it’s incredibly difficult to salvage, as the wick often refuses to light or stay lit for extended periods of time again.
Examine the Flame
You can tell a lot about your candle’s health and overall lifespan just by examining the flame that gets produced upon lighting. A candle that burns cleanly and efficiently has a flame that doesn’t flicker too much and sits more upright. If your flame flickers too much or just won’t stay upright despite there being no drafts or wind present, you should snuff out the flame and allow for some time to cool before trimming the wick. Once trimmed, you can relight and reexamine the flame to see if it looks better.
The End of a Candle’s Life?
One of the most important tips that I learned the hard way after startling myself several times - don’t burn the candle all the way down. Tempting as it may be to use every last drop of wax that you physically can, you want to leave about 10 millimeters of wax before finally calling it quits on a candle, especially if your candle comes in a glass jar. Reason being that you don’t want the flame getting too close to the candle jar’s base and overheating it. Glass will shatter, and other materials may get dangerously hot and melt or split. I’ve had jars straight-up explode unexpectedly from this because I wasn’t paying attention and wanted to use up all the wax. Leftover wax still got everywhere even after the jar exploded, and I had to wait for it all to dry so it could be scraped up and cleaned appropriately. Don’t be like the old negligent me—don’t burn your candles all the way down. 🤡
I will likely write a part 3 post for this series on Candle Magic dedicated to making your candles, for those that feel so inclined to try crafting their own candles, like some of my fall candles shown above. It’s rewarding and relaxing, and I’ll have tips to help make things more affordable, as well as for recycling and refurbishing candle jars for your manufacturing process. Until next time, friends. <3
