Candle Care Tips

Taking care of your candle will not only prolong the life and quality of your candle burns, but also ensures you're burning your candles safely to prevent flying embers or high flames. It may be hard to believe that a little candle can cause a big fire, but this becomes a really real possibility if proper candle care isn't taken.

So we're here to outline some candle care tips to keep you and your candle safe!

The Basics

First, we gotta start with the candle safety tips you usually see on the bottom of every candle.

  • Do NOT use an ET Designs candle lid to extinguish the candle. They're made of plastic filament and will burn.
  • Never leave a burning candle unattended.
  • Only burn candle on a level, heat-resistant surface and keep at least 12 inches away from anything that could catch fire.
  • Keep candles out of the reach of pets and children.
  • Avoid drafts, vents, or air currents.
  • Do not burn for longer than four hours.
  • Never touch or move a candle while it is burning or after extinguishing while the wax is liquefied.
  • Use a candle snuffer to extinguish a candle to prevent hot wax from splattering.
National Candle Association Tips

Trim Your Wick

This should always be your first step before each time lighting your candle! It's recommended to trim your wick to 1/4 inch. Trimming your wick can prevent tall flames, wick mushrooming, soot production, and reduced candle life.

You can buy wick trimmers from most candle supply stores, or you can use scissors or even nail trimmers. Just be sure you're trimming that wick!

Safe Lighting

Use long matches or a long-neck lighter to light your candle. Save the BIC lighters for the smoke seshes!

Also make sure the candle is free from debris, hair, or any foreign material that shouldn't be close to an open flame.

Allow Melt Pool To Reach Vessel Edge

For your first (and any) burn of your candle, it's important to let it burn long enough for the melt pool to fully reach the walls of the vessel to reduce your candle's chances of tunneling in the future.

Tunneling

Tunneling happens to a candle when the melt pool is not able to fully reach the edges of the vessel causing a depression in the wax. Tunneling isn't the biggest deal in the world but it can lead to uneven burns in the future and the possibility of wasted wax.

If you've burned your candle for almost 4 hours and the melt pool still has not reached the edges, then it is being caused by a small wick-size issue. Please let us know if this happens so we can make adjustments to future pours!

Tunneling Fix

If your candle is tunneling, one solution is to wrap aluminum foil around the top of the candle, focusing on covering the edges that are tunneled, while leaving room open for the vapors to escape on top. This method creates a heat chamber that allows the wax stuck to the edges to melt into the wax pool to then be burned by the wick!

Remove the foil once the wax pool has fully reached all edges of the candle.

Extinguish Candle

It's recommended to not blow out your candle with your mouth as it can cause hot wax to splash and it creates a draft that messes with the candle's natural combustion process (same reason why it's recommended to keep candles away from vents or air drafts).

Extinguishing options are a wick snuffer that will essentially suffocate the wick into extinguishing or a wick dipper that will allow you to dip the wick into the melted wax pool to safely extinguish it. You can buy either of these from most candle supply companies. Some companies that aren't Amazon that I recommend are General Wax or Makesy.

Allow Candle To Fully Cool

It's recommended to allow the candle to fully cool and solidify before trimming your wick ;) and relighting again (about 2 hours). Some reasons include that the vessel and wax will be hot from the burn you just extinguished. Relighting too soon could also cause tunneling, uneven burning, and it can mess with your candle's hot throw (the amount of scent you smell while it's lit) if the scent molecules aren't allowed to properly set while cooling.