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Candle scent

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Candle scent

The vast majority of candles you can buy today are scented, which makes them even more enjoyable.

When you light a scented candle, its perfume slowly spreads around, subtly changing the atmosphere of the room and the mood of the people who are there...

This is so true that you can now purchase a whole range of aromatherapy candles, whose scent are supposed to influence our health and/or our mood.

For example, for relaxation: tangerine and lavender; as a stimulant: mango, cedarwood and cloves; energizer: Ylang ylang and patchouli; respiration and tranquility: lavender, sandalwood and sage.

The list is very long and the combinations are endless!

Syhthetic fragrance oils are the most popular scents used in candlemaking (image © Candlescience)

Some people cannot stand the synthetic (or even natural) scents that come from scented candles. Myself, if exposed for more than ten minutes to an "apple spice" scented candle (even though the manufacturer claims it's made with natural extracts), my head threatens to explode. The candle doesn't even have to be lit.

So there is also definitely an important market for unscented candles.

But besides these aromatherapeutic considerations, it's just very nice to add a subtle perfume to the charm of a burning candle flame! Don't miss out on that pleasure, especially since adding fragrance to your candles is relatively easy and unexpensive.

To bring scent to your candles, you will be using fragrance oils.

Fragrance oils are synthetic oils, whicj means that their scent is chemically created and does not derive from natural elements. For instance, the fragrance oil labelled sage-lemon does not contain any sage or lemon extracts but its scent is a perfect replica of the real thing.

This offers several advantages:

  • the manufacturer does not have to rely on the availability of different plant essences, by nature seasonal and unpredictable,
  • a large production does not have any harmful consequences for potentially endangered species,
  • chemical synthesis allows to create almost any existing scent (applepie, stormy morning dew, freshly cut grass, designer perfume...), nothing is impossible,
  • the price of these chemical compounds is much lower than that of their natural counterpart.
Essential oils can, in some cases, be used to scent your candles

Of course, that natural counterpart does exist: it's called essential oils.

These natural oils are a lot more expensive to purchase because it takes a very large quantity of raw materials to produce a small amount of oil. As an example, 1400 kilos of violet flowers are necessary to produce one kilo of essential oil.

Furthermore, some essential oils are toxic and many of them would not survive the temperature it takes for wax to turn liquid.

So as far as candlemaking is concerned, you should probably stick with syhthetic fragrance oils.

Adding scent to Gel candles is a lot trickier than adding scent to paraffin wax candles. Before you even try, make sure you read our article titled Fragrance oils and Candle gel.
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