Beanpod Candles

[stacien]

Hey Peoples,

I was reading the beanpod website. Of course the question is "How do they get their tops to look so smooth?" Well did you notice it reads that they are made FROM not of 100% soybean wax. Downing parafin as an additive but they don't say they dont use other vegetable additives. Any of us can make a candle FROM 100% soy wax with........ Its all proper marketing grammer that prevents it from being false advertising. They are giving the Illusion that it is made OF 100% soy wax but the truth is they are omitting whats really the base ingredients because the average consumer is not (please nobody take offense)an english major.

Root candles don't even give any information so we know theirs is a blend for sure.

Ergo and Votivo and all those expensive ones. I checked out each one of those candles. They all have a greasy feel to them like Vaseline. They have no hardness. So I bet my life they have some form of vegetable oil in them.

I talked to several soy distributors including MC and they said the same about these candles. Plus they said it wouldn't sound like 100% soy if it didn't produce at least some frost lines.

So thank you for listening to me ramble on.

[Candlewitch]

You will be suprised how little some suppliers know. Soy is a veggy oil. Whatever the additives are, which may include parafin make it less pure then what we are making.

[Candlewitch]

Root is 30% soy. Not much, and the pumpkin spice burns black.

[Cabin Creek Candles]

There is no way when using 100% soy wax you are going to get a candle with smooth tops. No way! Unless you add something to it. When you see a company state their candles are 100% soy wax with no additives yet their candles are smooth and frost free steer away from them because they are not 100% soy wax.

[Crafty1_AJ]

I agree about the tricky wording hiding something. I'm always a skeptic, but in this case, I look at "STABILIZED" and see that they've done something to change soy wax's nature. IMO, they've "stabilized" it by adding other ingredients. No huge mystery to me! LOL Note that it does not say "100% soy wax" on the label. Key word: "stabilized" ...

Just the random brain firings of a middle-aged chandler, FWTW.

[topofmurrayhill]

There's a lot of confusion about terminology because there's no standard. Different manufacturers can adopt different definitions.

There is also a lot of confusion among soy candle makers.

For instance, there is no specific substance called soy wax. Soy wax is a blend of ingredients designed for making candles, much like the preformulated container blends used to make paraffin-based candles. All soy wax is a blend of multiple ingredients. (Some people might argue those 100% soy flakes you can buy are "soy wax" but you can't make candles out of that stuff so the point is moot.)

The ingredients in soy wax include vegetable oils that have been chemically altered to varying extents. There could be straight oil, partially hydrogenated oil, or fully hydrogenated oil. If all these ingredients are made from soy oil, it might be called a 100% soy wax.

There are additives in addition to these modified oils. Without these additives you would not have a usable wax. It would crack and/or not adhere and/or set up very lumpy/crystallized and/or frost like mad, etc. Not once in a while and not just a little bit, but always and a lot. These substances can be integral components of the wax, but let's call them additives anyway to conveniently distinguish from the oils.

Some additives are soy derived and some are not. If there are additives that aren't derived from soy they might still call it 100% soy wax or they might not. You don't really know if they are only considering the oil components or all the ingredients in deciding whether to call it 100% soy.

They can define it either way because it doesn't matter. "100% soy" is all about marketing mystique. For practical purposes it means "a container blend made with a selection of vegetable-derived ingredients constrained in such a way as to probably result in inferior performance".

The original inventors didn't obsess over 100% soy (it was hard enough to make something that kinda worked decently) and the wax formulators wouldn't care except for the marketing part. It has good eco-babble appeal.

[stacien]

I tend to be a skeptic and a realist. On the top cover (reading it right now) it say 100% stabilized soy wax. I remember bending over backward to get a 100% soy candle to burn on one wick. Thinking to myself "If beanpod can do it how come we can't?" Duh because they have additives that prevent the cottage cheese look and tunneling when burning. How stupid can I be. I might have no choice but to double wick a 4 inch diameter container. Why are we so set on %100 soy. Don't get me wrong I am a naturalist. I use 100% soy. But if we add another vegetable additive to perfect the burn and scent throw and appearance and still call it a all natural vegetable wax why do I feel guilty? I have to use Vegetable and not parafin because there is a component in Petrolatum that I physically have a reaction to. So as a consumer and people like me what do you look for?

My thought for the day!