Add Fragrance to Your Candle Making
Candlelight can add glamour to the most ordinary surroundings, and by making scented candles, you can transform your home. One of the most important factors people consider when buying or making candles is the fragrance. Most people will choose to buy a candle for its fragrance before they look at shape or color. This is because scents are an important part of our daily experience, often tied to our emotions.
Candle making suppliers have traditionally offered popular scents such as vanilla, cranberry, apple and others. Today, fragrance companies offer thousands of fragrance oils for the home candle maker. The choices are almost unlimited. Some of the top scents today are cinnamon, gardenia, eucalyptus, honeysuckle and jasmine. In choosing a fragrance, if you can’t find just the one you want, you can mix and match to make your own unique signature fragrance oil.
Many standard fragrances have been altered or enhanced, so new fragrances such as French Vanilla, or Warm Vanilla Sugar instead of plain vanilla are available. Others fruity scents are blended with rich spicy aromas, bringing memories of delicious aromas of baking in Mom’s kitchen.
Candle making fragrances are essential oils, with an oil base rather than an alcohol base. This is because alcohol based fragrances will not mix into waxes. Handle fragrance oils carefully, as you may have a reaction if they come into contact with your skin. If so, wash the area immediately with warm soapy water.
You will find that fragrance oils are sold either by volume or weight. Different oils will have different weights by volume, so if you buy by weight you may get different quantities of oil for each fragrance. When using the oils, use up to 5% for best results. If you want a highly scented candle, then you can use up to 8% fragrance in a paraffin based candle.
Soy waxes are more difficult to scent than paraffin waxes. They do not throw as much scent as the candle burns, and soy wax is not capable of holding as much fragrance oil. You can achieve better scent in your soy candles by adding palm stearic to the wax. Many fragrance companies are working on developing scents just for soy wax, to improve the scent throw of soy candles.
Aromatherapy candles are another popular type of fragranced candle – an easy, efficient way to take advantage of aromatherapy’s health benefits. Meanwhile, you have the added benefit of a pleasing fragrance and decorative touch in your home. Among the benefits of aromatherapy scents are alleviated chronic pains and injuries, prevention of anxiety and depression, and bolstering of the immune system. Enhance your candle collection as well as your health with aromatherapy candles.
