How to care for your candle
A handmade candle is a small, slow luxury and with a little care it rewards you with a cleaner burn, a stronger scent and a longer life. None of this is fussy. It’s just a handful of habits worth knowing.
The first burn sets the memory
Wax has a memory. The very first time you light your candle, let it burn until the melt pool reaches the edge of the vessel usually two to three hours for our larger pours. If you blow it out early, the candle “remembers” that smaller pool and will tunnel down the middle on every burn after, wasting the wax around the sides.
So: light it when you have a few unhurried hours, and let that first pool go all the way out.
Trim the wick, every time
Before each burn, trim the wick to about 5 mm (roughly the height of a grain of rice on its end). A long or mushroomed wick is the main cause of:
- soot on the glass
- a tall, flickering, smoky flame
- the scent burning off too fast
Once it’s cool, snap off the blackened tip with your fingers or a trimmer. It’s the single most useful thing you can do for a clean burn.
Mind the clock and the draught
- Burn for a maximum of four hours at a time. Beyond that the vessel overheats and the wick drifts.
- Keep candles out of draughts an open window or a fan makes the flame dance, which means uneven burning and soot.
- Always rest the candle on a heat-safe surface, away from anything that can catch.
Know when to stop
When about 1 cm of wax remains, retire the candle. Burning to the very bottom can crack the glass and scorch your surface. Which brings us to the best part…
Give the vessel a second life
Our vessels are made to be kept. Once the candle is finished, pop it in the freezer for an hour and the last of the wax will lift out cleanly. Wash with warm soapy water and you have a little pot for plants, brushes, trinkets or a small bunch of stems.
Bring a clean vessel back to us for a refill and we’ll take 10% off kinder on the planet, and on your pocket.
Small rituals, a longer life. That’s rather the whole idea.
