How to Optimize Your Soy Candle's Scent Throw

The longer your soy candle is allowed to cure, that is, to set after it's poured before its first burning, the stronger it will throw scent. The "scent throw" is the capacity in which the candles fragrance travels throughout the space and scents the room.

You can perform test burns to see how your new candle will throw scent. If it scents the room to your satisfaction, then it's ready. If you're not happy with it, extinguish the flame (after establishing the initial memory burn - see below), and wait another week and try again. You can keep testing this way and once your candle scents the room to your liking, it's ready for regular burning.

To further enhance your candles scent throw, it's important to establish a memory burn with its first lighting. Candles have a sort of memory. If you don't allow them to burn all the way to the edge of the container when you first burn them, on subsequent burns they will only burn to the edge created from the first burn, and will therefore tunnel (burn down instead of across) and waste alot of the wax. This initial burn should be for 1 hour per inch of the candles diameter (we add each containers diameter on our product pages for your convenience). This creates an optimum melt pool, and it's the melt pool that allows the wick to throw the candles fragrance. A melt pool of approximately 1/4" deep may be required before scent throw can be detected. This will also lengthen the life of your candle and use as much of the wax as possible.

Other things to consider:

* The larger the candle, the longer it should be allowed to cure.

* Some fragrances are naturally stronger than others and will therefore have stronger scent throws then the softer scents, no matter how long they're allowed to cure.

* People smell scents differently, so the same scent could smell strong for one person while weaker to another.

* Smell saturation can also inhibit the senses from detecting the fragrance. Saturation and fading is when we are exposed to one smell for a long time, it disappears from our conscious awareness. Try sniffing coffee beans before each burn or, even better, have a number of different scented candles on hand and rotate burning them regularly.