DCC

Focusing on why my employer and our contracts use such a high amount of fragrance load is digressing from the question. Is it necessary? No. Does it sell for a higher amount? Yes. In everything I was testing, it seems to always come back to the remelt process for the swirl appearance. I took different fragrances, fragrance load, and combination of different waxes we use to all have similar behavior if I increased or decreased the time in our remelting. My conclusion is that if there is an appearance of swirls on top (not a texture, just a visual), minimizing remelt time caused them to no appear. I was able to mimic it back and forth. Took a candle with no swirls and over melt it again under the heaters and the swirls came back. Gave the same candle a minimal amount of time under the heater and they went away. I know the caveat is what limitations and variables from my lab but hope this helps give some info to others. Thanks for everyone’s input!

I've been testing different variables for a couple days now. Surprisingly, when I used heavier fragrance loads, the swirls are less prominent. When I compared 10%, 15%, and 20% fragrance loads in the lab (we commonly use 10-15% for production), the higher fragrance loads had less swirl. The worst of this effect was with no fragrance. One of the things I tested was topping off the candle vs going through a remelt process. The top off did have some color variation on top but nowhere near that swirl effect. Next, I'm going to see the difference between barely remelted vs overly remelted. Update tomorrow!

Hey, got it to work! This is not a soy blend and has no fragrance.

I See people saying it could be due to fragrance load. I work for a candle manufacturer and I was asked to look into swirls like this. I honestly thought it was due to the wick wax from the remelt process. There is some truth to that but I am actually noticiing siwrls when I dye wax and pour with no fragrance or wick as well. It wont let me past a picture directly into here and do not have a URL to insert image.