Improve Essential Oils Scent Throw in Candles


Improve Essential Oils Scent Throw in Candles

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Working with organic supplies isn’t easy. Playing around with organic wax, essential oils and even natural dyes requires going through a stip learning curve of experiments, trials and errors, failures and eventual successes.

The most common problem in the organic candle makers community is improving cold and hot throws in candles using only organic wax and essential oils.

The essential oils’ extreme sensibility to temperature requires the melted wax to cool down at around 60°C (140°F) before adding them to the blend. Temperature control is the main factor in improving hot and cold scent throw along with choosing the suitable wax, wick and even the curing time.

We’ve experimented and documented a lot during the lockdown. In today’s post, we will expand more discoveries to our most famous post about the perfect temperature to add essential oils to homemade candles.

Understanding Cold and Hot Throw Scent Throw

We want to look at cold and hot scent throws under a couple of lenses: our customers and us as candle producers.

If it’s not clear yet, here is how we define these two scent throws:

  • cold throw: the intensity of the scent before lighting the candle
  • warm or hot throw: the intensity of the scent when the candle is burning

If you imagine the customer experience, the cold throw is their first sensorial touchpoint with your product, is the hook that convinces them to try out your candle among all others – while the latter, warm/hot throw, is their actual experience of the candle in their environment of choice.

In the second stage, the burning process and scent throw play a massive role in your customer experience, making them retained to your brand – guaranteeing future revenues.

As candle makers/producers, we are interested in mastering cold and hot throws to ensure our craft aligns with our product vision. And it’s done in a way to optimize the customer experience throughout all the product journey (from shelf to its last drop); to retain as many customers as possible and ideally use their referrals to get new ones, because our products are too good that “you gotta try this”.

The temperature factor is critical; however, you must be cautious while stirring the melted wax and the essential oils. Do NOT stir it too much for too long because essential oils might dissolve at high temperatures.

The advice is to prepare all your containers, wait for the temperature to become ideal, pour the essential oils in, stir just a bit and pour everything in the containers.

How Does the Type of Wax Influence Essential Oils Performance

The difficulty doesn’t only come from essential oils, but it’s insidious in almost all the supplies we use as well since the candle-burning process acts as a system.

The type of wax is essential because organic ones, like soy or coconut, are much denser than paraffin-based waxes, making them harder to melt. Unfortunately, this means the flame is much hotter, which might compromise the scent of essential oils.

However, it’s possible to control the burning pool using the candle wick properly. We’ve written an entire article on how to optimize the burning process.

Whether you’re planning to use soy or coconut wax for your candles is worth ensuring that the rest of the candle system is in place.

An essential thing to remember that will increase the chances of having a better cold and hot throw is that once you’ve created a candle, that candle has to settle for a while; this process is called curing and guess what? Each wax has its own time.

Below are our suggested times, depending on which type of wax you are working with for creating your candles.

WaxCure Time
Soy Wax2 Weeks
Coconut Wax2 Weeks
Beeswax10 Days
Paraffin Wax5 Days
Gel Wax1 Day

I know it’s tricky to wait so much time to test your creation – however, it is like a cake; wait some time after it’s out of the oven and tastes better!

While waiting for the time to pass, remember to store candles in a closed, dry and difficult-to-reach place. If you fancy a read, we have a great article here about storing and packaging candles.

Essential Oils vs Fragrance Oils

Like you, we decided to go towards organic essential oils because we try to use as many organic products as possible, avoiding artificially created and not eco-friendly supplies.

However, choosing to use such organic materials influences the scent throw of our creations big times. So yes, even if we create the best possible candle following all the dogmas and mathematical formulas, we will create a great candle with a scent throw that will be inferior to a candle made with paraffin and artificial fragrances.

The problem of the scent throw is in deficit from the start! Therefore, we have selected those essential oils that performed better in our candles and are available here on our resource page for you to consult.

We like to combine them, two or three blends per candle, and after the curing time, you can perceive the various essences we used pretty distinctly.

Fragrance oils are cheaper and more durable because they are created in labs and make a great essence almost straightaway, even if you make mistakes throughout the candle creation process on both cold and hot throws.

We tried to use them, and you should do the same if you start to understand the differences and complexities yourself.

Conclusion

Creating candles with essential oils comes with more difficulties, but like any challenge can be faced and conquered. The mastery comes from craft, lots of craft, experiments and failures.

Be precise:

  • with the temperature at which you pour the essential oils into the melted wax
  • when you stir the oils in the blend (do not stir it too much for too long)
  • wait for the candle to settle through its specific curing time
  • store it in a safe place

Enjoy the scent throws you’ll undoubtedly produce soon!

Alberto

Alberto loves to study its wax-based creations, measuring, annotating, melting, mixing and sometimes failing! His favourite candle is organic bergamot scented soy wax.

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The essential oils' extreme sensibility to temperature requires the melted wax to cool down at around 60°C (140°F) before adding them to the blend. Temperature control is the main factor in improving hot and cold scent throw along with choosing the suitable wax, wick and even the curing time.