keithlj

Hello everyone, I am new to this forum, but, I thought I would through my two cents into the discussion. I have been making my own candles for a little over a year off and on. I decided to use 100% soy wax. I read a lot about the fragrance load of candles and decided that like a lot of the info on the internet fragrance load was inaccurate. Being an engineer/scientist "general rules of thumb" do not empress me. I got myself some cheap chemistry glass ware from an online store and began to experiment. I work in metric so all my numbers are metric and in percent by weight. I have read that the max fragrance load for soy wax was between 1.0 and 1.5 oz. per lb. That converts to between 6.3 and 9.4 percent by weight. Using a gram scale I found that most of my fragrance weighted between .95 and 1.0 grams per ml. I started out at 8 percent fragrance load. My glass container holds 378 grams of wax so I added 31 ml of fragrance (rounded to the next higher ml). My experimental results to date are as follows. At eight percent fragrance by weight the candle smelled great cold and the hot throw was excellent. The problem was that the wick when sized for the container did not give me a pool of liquid wax that went to the sides of the container and the candle did not burn well. I increased the wick size three steps larger on the next few and the candle still did not burn well, the pool was not right, the solidified wax changed consistency, and looked funny toward the end. I concluded that as the candle burned the concentration of fragrance to volume of wax was increasing and overloading the wax that was left. I have just made two new candles with 4.3% of fragrance. They still smell nice cold and I will be trying them out soon. I keep a journal of my candles so that I can see what works and what does not work. Thanks, Keith