How to Make a Candle or Reed Diffuser: Choosing Supplies
How to Make a Candle or Reed Diffuser as a Gift: Choosing the Right Supplies
YIT.LT, Arnas Šarkūnas
2024 12 13
As the cold season sets in and we spend more time in our homes, we want to make them cosy, filled with natural warmth and pleasant scents. Candles and home fragrance sticks are often used for this. Eglė Salienė, founder of Soyacandles.lt, which sells raw materials for them, notes that Lithuanians are increasingly making these home attributes themselves, and advises on how to choose the right ingredients.
"Lithuanians find candles and home fragrances with sticks to be cosy and very personal home accents, so many people make them themselves. Others buy them already made, sometimes as gifts. The trend is that candles and home fragrances are mostly remembered when the cold season comes, so our business is very seasonal: the colder the weather, the bigger the basket", says Eglė, who co-founded Soyacandles.lt with her husband Laurynas.
There are plenty of materials to choose from
According to Saliene, the choice of material is probably the most difficult part of buying a candle or making one yourself: the constantly updated range of candles is huge and suited to every taste. Candles made from paraffin wax are often chosen for their lower price. They can be found in almost all supermarkets.
"Often a candle made from paraffin wax, which is essentially a petroleum product, will be brighter in colour and smell stronger than natural wax products. However, if cheap paraffin and poor aromatic oils have been used in the production process, such a candle can be harmful to health. There are now candles on the market that are extremely well purified and of high quality paraffin, but this material still has a bad reputation," she says.
Palm wax is relatively cheap. However, it looks like an environmentally friendly material at first glance, but the extraction and production process can be very harmful to the environment. A much more expensive but more environmentally friendly option is natural beeswax, which is produced in very small quantities. This richly coloured, distinctly honey-scented and fast-burning material has even been called luxury wax.
A good and environmentally friendly alternative is vegetable waxes, the most popular of which are made from coconut, rapeseed or soya. When choosing vegetable wax or candles made from it, it is worth checking whether the ingredients contain chemical additives.
Choose quality
When choosing a candle, as Ms Salienė points out, a lot of attention is paid to the container, the scent and the wick. Despite the huge choice, transparent containers and candles without special impurities are the most popular. However, they caution that if you buy a candle decorated with dry flowers and herbs, you should remove such decorations if possible before using it and maintain them while the candle is burning.
The most popular scents depend on the season: soft, light, citrus and aquatic scents dominate in the summer, while stronger, richer, woody, resinous and leathery scents become more prevalent as the days get shorter. Many customers want the wick to crackle like wood in a fireplace. Wooden wick candles are the way to go, but the sound also depends a lot on how well the wick combines with the wax, the vessel, the paint and even the scent.
"In general, consumers have become more conscious and want better fragrances, so that they don't smell chemicals, as they stress. They are therefore opting for more expensive, handmade natural wax candles and buying more expensive ingredients to make them. They also do not shy away from asking questions about product labelling, and seek advice on various issues such as calculating the concentration of ingredients, proper cooking and temperature control. It is important to understand that a good candle is made with good raw materials and properly balanced combustion, while the candle-making process itself is a slow and often inexpensive process," the expert stresses.
She adds that there are many alternatives to candles on the market. These include aromatic lamps that gently warm the scented wax solution, sand or pearl wax that is added to a container and only requires a wick, and products that do not even require a wick.
Citrus and berry scents in the home too
There are many choices when it comes to home fragrances too. These range from wooden balls that only need to be scented, to essential oils, which are less popular due to their higher price, and the most popular home scents, which are still the ones with sticks. The latter, according to Ms Salienė, are even easier to make than candles - you only need to mix two liquids: the aromatic oil and the scent base.
When choosing the ingredients, you can ask the seller to provide you with the manufacturer's safety data sheet, the IFRA (International Fragrance Association) Safety Data Sheet, and a list of the ingredients. The manufacturer's certificate, provided by the International Fragrance Association (IFRA), and a list of allergens. The country of manufacture does not usually affect the quality of the fragrance. However, the main quality criterion set by customers is whether or not it smells delicious.
"The most popular aromatic oils in Lithuania are niche, perfume-like and distinctive, with a fragrance that spreads easily and usually has at least a few notes that can be detected when smelled. Wood, citrus and berry scents are the most popular, while more gourmand scents such as baked goods, spiced oranges and baked apple tend to be in people's shopping baskets before Christmas. We see that Lithuanians increasingly appreciate quality, so we try to offer more expensive scents as well," says one of the co-founders of Soyacandles.lt.
