Candle burning tips: getting the most out of your candle

During the Pamper Me Fabulous event last week, I talked with a husband and wife team who were selling their hand-crafted luxury candles--Zensual, while I purchased their yummy smelling Asian Lychee Blossom candle, which burns for 90 hours.

I've blogged about soy candles before and how they burn longer and without emitting soot, but Rachel Evey at Zensual provided me with some other interesting candle tips that I wanted to share with everyone. To begin with, the best way to enjoy and extend the long-life of a candle begins with the first burn. It is important to leave the candle burning long enough to create a melt pool that goes across the entire candle to the glass edge. As soy candles have what is generally considered as a "melt memory," a full initial burn will help prevent future tunneling-- where the candle burns unevenly or straight down the center and eventually drowns out in its own melt pool. Most soy-based candles are designed to burn between 2-4 hours at a time.

Also, because the pure scent of a candle is released from this pool of melted wax, generally paying attention to the way in which your candle burns and taking some simple steps to correct any irregularities will prolong the life of your candle. These steps include, keeping your candle out of drafts, centering the wick after burning, and always trimming the wick to 1/4" before each use. As stated, drafts, un-centered wicks or untrimmed wicks not only cause the candle to burn irregularly and emit soot (even if soy), but also can cause a flame to enlarge, effectively incinerating away some of the beautiful fragrance.

Another interesting point that Rachel mentioned was that you don't have to have the same scented candle throughout your home and in fact, having different scents helps you to continue to smell them. After all, if the same scent is in each room you'll get desensitized to it, but if there is one scented candle in one room and a different scented candle in another room, your senses will reawaken and continue to smell each fragrance as you walk from room to room. This theory conviently worked out for me since I already have a vanilla soy candle in my bedroom and just bought this lychee one.

On another candle related note, I always liked the following proverb and think it's something more women and working professionals need to keep in mind:

A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle”