Yes, we're different

You may be wondering, what makes our candle different from another with the same scent? Much like Toll House’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, even if we both follow it, our cookies turn out differently because of the different brands of ingredients we use and cooking variations from baking sheets to real oven temps.

A simple recipe, candles are basically wax, wick and fragrance.

However, there are several options for wax like paraffin, bee’s wax, coconut/soy blends, and many variations of soy waxes. For our candles, we choose 100% soy wax that comes from the Midwest. It doesn’t contain any petroleum byproducts like paraffin wax, and it offers a cleaner and slower burn. We choose to get the wax from a U.S. source because we want to support production at home when we can. Plus, a good friend’s dad is a soybean farmer in Iowa!

Like wax, there are several brands and sizes of wicks to choose from. It requires a lot of testing to select the correct size wick to get optimum performance for the wax and fragrances we use. The wicks we choose are lead-free braided cotton wicks. Our goal is to have the candle burn safely, melting the wax all the way across the top, and using all the wax down the sides until it reaches the bottom leaving about ½ -¼” left. It’s best not to burn it beyond that point to prevent the container from getting too warm. We want you to enjoy your candle for many hours and feel satisfied that it performed well.

The world of fragrances is huge. Most importantly, we narrow it down by only selecting fragrances that have been rigorously tested and are free of phthalates and toxins. If it hasn’t been certified, then we don’t use it. And there is a range to how strongly a candle can be scented. We choose a lighter fragrance load for our candles, resulting in a more subtle smell, not overpowering.

In addition to those choices, we also consider the heating temperature and pouring temperature for the wax, cooling temperature for the candles, and curing time to optimize the cold throw and hot throw, which is candle speak for how the candles smell when not burning and when burning.

And all of this is done by hand, not machines, or mass producing, just hand poured, one candle at a time in small batches. So for better or worse, there may be a slight variation along the way. We call that the “maker’s mark” and it lets you know there was a real person who made your candle.