Candle Wicks (and you!)

Howdy, candle connoisseurs!

Have you ever noticed that every candle that comes across your feed seems to have a different type of wick? Some candles note specific wick materials, or even claim a wick type as a feature of the candle. From hemp to cotton to crackling wood, you might have wondered--does the wick make a difference, or can it be anything as long as it keeps the wax melted?

 

Let's explore.

The wick is possibly the most underestimated component of candle making. Even more than the vessel you use for your candle--and impacted heavily by the chosen wax and fragrance oil--the wick is far more than just a string that you light on fire. The choice of wick can make or break your candle, influencing burn time, fragrance release, and overall ambiance that it gives off for the discerning candle owner.

The Heart of the Flame: Understanding Wick Types

Wicks come in various materials, each with unique characteristics.

Cotton wicks are a popular choice, known for their clean burn and minimal soot. They're often interwoven with paper to help them light and stay lit. Some cotton wicks are "self trimming," meaning that they tend to "trim" themselves by dropping excess bits. This can leave you with floating ash crumbs in your candle, but prevents the flame from getting too large, which can be a fire hazard.

Wood wicks can offer a distinctive crackling sound, adding an extra sensory dimension to your candle.

Hemp wicks are eco-friendly and contribute to a slow, even burn, but can be tricky to keep in good condition and tend to ball up and soot (read: smoke, and leave ash and bits of burn in your candle).

 

Burn Baby, Burn: The Impact on Burn Time

One thing that many candle buyers pay attention to is the expected burn time of the candle. Burn time is a factor of how quickly the wax turns into fuel for the flame, and a large part of that is determined by the wick. The thickness of your wick will determine how much fuel it can consume and burn at once, and even minuscule changes in the wick sizing can impact the "burn radius," or how wide the circle of wax it can melt will be.

This also means that thicker wicks burn more fuel, and will reduce the burn time of your candle, whereas a thinner wick will increase the burn time. However, there is a delicate balance of making sure that you don't choose too small of a wick, or you may get tunneling, which can lead to your wick "drowning" in wax, and not being able to stay lit.

For this reason, some experienced candlemakers will choose to err on the side of slightly over-wicking candles rather than under-wicking, as it makes the candle more "foolproof," and some will choose to slightly under-wick rather than over-wick if they're hoping to specifically lengthen the burn life of the candle. All this depends on what your goals are and who your expected customer is.

Having more wicks in your candle will also, obviously, reduce the lifetime burn. You may notice that you get less burn time out of a standard Bath and Body Works 3-wick candle than you do out of their single-wicks, even though the candles themselves are larger. The "triple-wick" nature of these candles means they're consuming fuel at a 3x rate (assuming they use the same wicks in both candles), meaning you'd effectively need 3x as much wax to match the lifetime.

For this reason, candlemakers that multi-wick their candles will play around with wick material, placement, and size to try to get a candle that burns evenly all the way to the edge without getting too hot, and without (excuse the pun) burning through your candle at an alarming rate.

 

Bigger Always Better? Learn about Wick Sizing

You might notice that some of your larger candles have one wick, whereas others have multiple. Or, that some of your wicks seem to be about the thickness of a piece of yarn, where others are more like the thickness of a crochet string. Why is this?

It's all about Burn Radius.

As mentioned above, you'll get a wider burn from larger wicks, but a narrower burn from narrower wicks. That thickness/narrowness comes from different wick sizes.

Wicks come in dozens of sizes, and they're not universal. Every style or well-known manufacturer of wicks has their own sizing schema. Take Eco and CDN, two popular wick styles, both cotton-and-paper hybrids and both heavily used in soy and paraffin candles alike. The two types of wicks start fairly comparable (Eco-4 & CD-4), but start to diverge as diameters get larger (moving toward the right).

(Comparison chart borrowed from www.candlescience.com)

In addition, the radius of your wick's burn is heavily impacted by what wax your candle has in it. Some wicks aren't suitable for use in some waxes at all, where as some can be used fairly universally, but you'll need to change up your sizing, because the wax has a different melting temperature, different thickness, additives, or fragrance oil concentrations, etc.

Take this example of different waxes being used for tealights and extra-small candles, and note the number of different wick variations there are even among the same candle sizes, depending on which wax your candle has -- such as a CD6 for Cargill Naturewax C-3, but a CD4 (smaller wick) for Golden Brands 464 Soy wax.

Wooden wicks, on the other hand, come with multiple size dimensions, including wick shape, width, thickness of the wood, and whether you have a booster (which can also vary in thickness). Each of these dimensions is heavily impacted by the size of container, what types of wax you use, whether you want your wick to "crackle," and more.

 

Melt My Heart: Wick Impact on Melt Pool

Have you ever had a candle that didn't burn quite to the edge of the container? Or one that melted to the edge of the container within minutes of lighting? This is a result of improper wicking, meaning that the candle maker either chose the wrong size of wick for the container, or placed the wicks incorrectly.

Ideally, your candle should take around 2-3 hours to melt completely to the edge, indiciating that the wick is wide enough but not so wide that you're burning at too fast of a rate. After all the wax on top of the candle is melted (we call this a "full melt pool"), it should stay melted at no more than around 1/2" even when burned for extended periods, and the sides of the candle shouldn't get so hot that they'll burn you if you touch it.

If your candle fails to reach the edge, it could be the result of either improper sizing or bad wick placement. Even a few millimeters can make a difference if a wick is off-center, and you may end up with a sort of "cliff" of wax at the edge that never melts. Sometimes this can be corrected by burning your candle for extended periods, but other times it can cause burn issues like wick drowning or chunks of wax being left on the side of the candle. This is especially common with mass-produced candles that aren't individually inspected for wick sizing, as you usually will get from someone who individually manufactures candles, and can sometimes mean that manufacturers choose a larger wick to compensate for bad placement, shortening the life of the candle and, in the worst cases, causing overheating.

 

Full Fragrance: Wick Size and Scent Throw

We all know that the best candles illuminates the space and fill it with a noticeable--but not overwhelming-- fragrance. It's fairly common knowledge that the size of the candle will impact how much fragrance you can smell, but wha you may not know is that the size of the wick also influences the amount of fragrance released into the air.

 Many sites will tell you that a larger wick can result in a more substantial scent throw, which is generally true. However, if your wick is too large for your vessel, it could be TOO hot, which will burn up the fragrance oil before it has a chance to distribute into the air. If the wick is too small, it could have too weak of a "throw," meaning your fragrance stays contained close to the candle itself.

Fragrance oil concentrations also matter. It seems logical that more fragrance = stronger smell, but this isn't always true. Most candle waxes can carry a fragrance oil up to about 10-12% of the volume, but at higher concentrations, that oil can actually "clog up" the wick, meaning that the wick will have a hard time burning all of the oils and distributing it, resulting in a weak throw. Many candlemakers claim that they see the best hot throw performance when they reduce fragrance oil concentrations to between 8-10% rather than 10-12% because the wick will actually perform better in those circumstances.

So, the next time you see a candle company advertising extra-high fragrance oil concentration for better throw, know that that doesn't necessarily mean a stronger smell!

 

It's not Rocket Science, it's Candle Science.

For these and other reasons, choosing a wick size isn't perfect science because of the many factors involved and the unique blends of waxes, fragrance oil blends, container sizes and materials, and more, which is why good candlemakers will thoroughly test candles they sell through multiple iterations prior to putting them on the market.

At Second Life, we understand that every candle lover is unique, and every candle requires attention and care when developed. That's why we offer candles with multiple sizes and types of wicks to cater to your individual preferences. We primarily utilize cotton wicks for their high performance, dependability, and sustainability, and use the best-quality wood wicks in some candles (like our Shared Trauma line) to give you that aesthetic, crackling boost. Because a large portion of our candles are one-of-a-kind, we use a design method that helps us get our sizing right consistently across a wide variety of vessels while keeping controls in other factors, such as wicks and fragrance oil concentrations. This helps make sure that when it lands in your hands, it performs at its best.

 

Every candle tells a unique story, and we hope to find you the perfect one for yours.

Burn bright!

 

❤️ Jules

Owner, Second Life Candles