Adding Scents to Your Candles
The light coming from burning, beautifully done candles can give an ordinary room a warm, romantic ambience. Pair that with subtle, elegant fragrance coming through scented candles…
The good news is that scented candles still gives out their fragrance even when they are not lit, making them wonderful, hand-crafted gifts (what can be more personal than that?).
Another good news is that you can easily get fragrance oils for making scented candles in different scents from most craft stores. Try to stick to oil-based fragrance simply because wax is mainly composed of oil so they will tend to mix better than with water or alcohol-based fragrances.
To make scented candles you will first decide the type of wax you are using – soy, palm, beeswax, paraffin, gel, etc. Most types of wax can be used to make scented candles although you might want to check how much fragrance to use with different types of wax.
How and when do you add scents and fragrance during your candle making process?
- First, you will melt the wax using a double boiler (or multi-cooker if you are using gel wax). Make sure to get the temperature right so that the wax doesn’t burn. A thermometer always come sin handy for this.
- Place the wick at the center of your mold.
- When the wax is melted, remove it from the heat source and add the fragrance oil. Rule of thumb is to use approximately 1 ounce of fragrance oil to 1 pound of wax – aim for about 6% of fragrance concentration – and try not to go above this or you are going to end up with candles that may not burn properly due to the amount of liquid contained in them. Less is more, sometimes. Don’t worry if you don’t get this perfectly right the first time… as with many other things, it takes practice until you finally get the hang of how much fragrance to add into your wax. Keep a record somewhere every time you experiment so that you can easily refer back to it.
- Let the wax cool down, remove it from the mold, and voila… your handcrafted, beautiful, scented candles are yours.
Adding fragrances and colors gives candle makers a lot of room to be creative. Don’t you think it’s awesome to give a gift that not only you handcraft and fully personalize, but also give that sense of warm ambience and relaxing, soothing effect? Your friends and family will love you for it!
