Candle marketing has a vocabulary problem. “Clean burning”, “natural”, “non-toxic” — none of these are regulated terms, so here’s plainly what we use and why.
The wax
We pour a soy-coconut blend. Pure soy is the wax most small studios start with: renewable, slow-burning, and it takes colour well. Its weakness is fragrance throw — soy holds only so much oil before it starts to sweat, and a soy-only candle often smells wonderful cold and disappointing lit. Coconut wax has a softer crystal structure that carries more fragrance and burns more evenly. Blended, you get soy’s slow burn with coconut’s throw.
What we don’t use is paraffin — a petroleum by-product that throws beautifully and cheaply, which is exactly why so much of the market is built on it.
The wick
Braided cotton, lead-free, sized individually to each jar diameter and each fragrance load. Wick sizing is most of the work: a wick one size too small tunnels, one size too large soots and overheats the glass. Every new scent goes through burn tests before it’s sold, which is the least glamorous part of this job.
The fragrance
Phthalate-free fragrance oils, dosed between 8 and 10 per cent depending on the blend. Higher isn’t better past a point — excess oil doesn’t bind to the wax, it pools, and it burns off as smoke.
What “clean burning” honestly means
Every flame produces some soot; that’s combustion. What you can control is how much. A properly sized wick, trimmed to 5 mm, in a wax that doesn’t overheat, produces so little that the glass stays clear to the last centimetre. That’s the standard we test to — not a claim that burning something produces nothing at all.