Wholesale Candle Supplies

A Look at Additives for Candle Making

While colorants and scents can be added to a candle to change its color and smell, other additives can be thrown into the mix to change less obvious attributes. Although the attributes we’re going to be manipulating here are less obvious than the candle’s color and scent, they’re extremely important. For example, you can change how hard or soft a candle is, how quickly or slowly it burns, and how clear the color appears. Something that you’ll need to keep in mind as you read is that the use of most extra additives in candle making is considered to fall under the advanced facet of the craft. Considering this, it’s no surprise that the skillful use of most of these additives requires a bit of practice, experimentation and experience. This isn’t something that you want to jump into without adequate research, or you can end up completely ruining an entire batch of candles.

Let’s start with stearic acid. Stearic acid is an additive used to manipulate the hardness of candles. Specifically, this candle additive makes candles harder. Being harder makes a candle much less likely to deform over time because of things like changing weather, warm environments or heat in general. The hardness of a candle also affects how long it takes for the candle to burn. While making a candle harder with stearic acid can be great, there are two major side effects to using this candle additive. First, stearic acid changes the color of a candle to a lighter shade. Second, it makes the color of a candle fade much faster.

To combat the fading side effects of stearic acid, you could use another type of additive called an ultraviolet inhibitor. As you could probably guess, the primary function of a UV inhibitor is to prevent fading, and for this reason it’s a great additive to pair up with stearic acid. What’s also interesting about ultraviolet inhibitors in your candles is that they can give the color of your candles a pastel-like effect. In fact, many people use a combination of basic colors with an ultraviolet inhibitor candle additive to produce pastel colored candles.

If you want to make a candle look less opaque, then you’ll want to use a candle additive for clarity. A clear additive is good for candles that have embedded patterns or objects since it will make it easier to see them when the candle is lit. Additionally, adding a candle additive for clarity gives candles a very beautiful lighting effect since light is able to pass through the candle more easily. However, one major side effect of this type of candle additive is that it makes the wax much thicker. When wax is thicker, it makes it more difficult to burn. When you’re planning on using a clear additive, you might want to plan ahead and use a wick that burns hotter than average to compensate. This is an example of the type of advanced strategy that is needed when you are using extra additives for candle making.

A very useful candle additive called stearin has a fun property that causes candles to shrink more after they have cooled. The most obvious use of this is to make it easier to retrieve candles from their molds once you have poured them and they have finished cooling down. Stearin candle additives have a clear texture and are generally made using some type of palm oil. By causing a candle to shrink, stearin makes the candle drip less, which in turn causes the candle to last longer. One side effect of stearin is that it can make colors more vibrant and flashy, but you always want to mix stearin with the color dye separately before adding it to the melting pot.

There is one particular problem with stearin that is specific to the use of latex molds. The problem is that pouring a candle wax that includes stearin into a latex mold can cause it to break down on a chemical level and fall apart. Essentially, stearin will destroy latex candle molds. Because of this, you will want to use vybar in place of stearin if you will be using candle molds made out of latex. Vybar acts similarly as stearin, but you have to use very small amounts. While stearin is generally used with one part candle additive for ten parts candle wax, vybar is used at a maximum of one part additive to one hundred parts wax.