Material Transparency
Candle Wax & Vessels
For our candles, we use a luxury coconut apricot creme wax called Ceda Serica made by Calwax. We chose this wax over soy or beeswax because it has insanely better cold & hot throws than other waxes so our customers will actually smell the scent they pay for. We also chose it because I've been known to get headaches from paraffin candles and I don't feel comfortable using soy wax due to its possible environmental contributions to deforestation. We plan to see if we can purchase directly from Calwax in the future but we've currently been purchasing through a third-party candle supply vendor, Hive & Honey Candle Co.
For our vessels, we've purchased from a company called Dream Vessels but to be honest, we weren't a fan of the quality of those vessels for the expensive price they were charging. So we found a local candle supply shop in Los Angeles called General Wax & Candle Company that has an incredible range of high-quality vessels at a price that fits our budget.
Fragrance Oils
Our priority when looking at fragrance oils is the quality of the ingredients used to ensure they're safe to use and burn in our candles. We only buy our fragrance oils from trusted, reputable brands who are also transparent with their ingredients. Safety data sheets for each individual fragrance should be found on the supplier's website.
The main companies we've sourced our fragrance oils from include Aztec Candle & Soap Supplies, Candlescience, The Flaming Candle, and we've also tried some of Hive & Honey's fragrance oils before. We like to buy from different brands and combine a few scents for each candle to ensure each candle is an original ET Designs scent.
Materials
There are a lot of various materials & utensils we use to make our candles to link them all here but I'll include some of the more important ones here and if anyone has any questions on more specific details, you can always reach out to us to ask about any of our materials!
We source our wicks from Hive & Honey and use an HPSP wick of various sizes depending on the container we're using. Some info on why we picked it: "The HPSP Wick series is a high-performance special flat wick with a tight woven naturally sourced clean cotton core. HPSP wicks are designed to produce a uniform flame that does not drown, inhibits carbon formation, and are lead & zinc-free. The HPSP wick series performs especially well in coconut waxes due to its slow and even burn capabilities."
For the actual candle pouring, our main materials used are our Digiboil that melts and heats our wax to its needed temperature, a pouring pitcher that we use to mix the fragrance combination into the wax, and a piston funnel to pour the mixed wax into their vessels. Our Digiboil we bought from Howdy Brewer, and the pouring pitcher & piston funnels are from Amazon.
Stickers
We use our sticker materials not just for our die-cut stickers but also for our various paper needs for our candles (vessel labels, packaging, etc). We have an Epson ET-2760 EcoTank printer which has been phenomenal at printing our materials. Plus the refillable EcoTank feature has been a lot more user-friendly and isn't as wasteful as using an ink cartridge printer.
For our stickers, we use Koala matte vinyl sticker paper. It's just been the best performing paper out of others we've tried. We then use either a clear, glossy lamination or a holographic, glossy lamination (holo paper linked may not necessarily be exact one we order but the design options are the same as what we use). Then to cut our papers, we use our trusted pink Silhouette Cameo 4 that always does a great job at clean, consistent cuts.