Making Guides
Choose · Test · Make it burn properly
Guides for making your own, rather than choosing what to buy. Ten of them, in three groups. Candles come as an overview plus one guide per decision — wick, wax, fragrance oil, vessel — because each one changes how the finished candle burns. Perfume and sprays are separate, because anything that reaches skin answers to limits a candle never meets, and the same material can be permitted in a jar and restricted on a pillow. Soap is separate again: it is the one thing here made with a corrosive, and that changes what the first section of the guide has to be.
How to Make a Candle
Start here. How the four decisions work as one system, what a good candle does, and how to make your first one.
Read guide →How to Choose a Candle Wick
Wick types, sizing to your vessel, and how to run a burn test — plus why the published wick charts disagree with each other.
Read guide →How to Choose a Candle Wax
Paraffin, soy, coconut, beeswax — and why the published figures for the same wax disagree between sellers.
Read guide →How to Choose a Fragrance Oil
Flash point, vanillin, compatibility, IFRA and the SDS — and why two oils sold as the same scent are different products.
Read guide →How to Choose a Candle Vessel
A vessel is a heat exchanger, not a container — what ASTM F2179 covers, why porosity disqualifies, and why material changes your wick.
Read guide →How to Make Perfume and Cologne
Alcohol, concentration, resting and application — and why skin contact changes which limits apply to the same material.
Read guide →How to Make Wax Melts
No wick, so no burn testing — and instead a fragrance percentage with three meanings, a cure argument nobody has settled, and a warmer you do not choose.
Read guide →How to Choose a Wax Warmer
Four heating architectures, what the controls and certification marks actually tell you, and why rated wattage does not predict how hot the wax gets.
Read guide →How to Make Soap
Lye first, because it can burn you before it hurts — then why a saponification value is a range rather than a constant, and the three denominators water gets specified against.
Read guide →How to Make Room, Linen and Pillow Spray
Solubilisers, carriers and preservation — and why the same liquid answers to three different IFRA categories depending on what you say it is for.
Read guide →