On Wax

Wax and wick. That's all a candle is. Everything else — the scent, the shape, the color, the vessel, the marketing that tells you this particular candle will make your bathroom feel like a Provençal farmhouse — is decoration. Wax and wick. Something to burn and something to burn it on. I make candles for a living. I have been making candles for a living for nine years, which is seven years longer than anyone expected, including me. Before candles I taught secondary school English, and before that I was going to be a writer, and before that I didn't know what I was going to be, which at nineteen felt like a crisis and at thirty-eight feels like honesty. The teaching ended when the school did. Budget cuts. I was last in, first out. I could have found another school. Instead I found a YouTube video about candle making, which is a sentence that accurately describes the early twenty-first century. The first batch was terrible. I used a pasta pot and a meat thermometer and paraffin wax from a craft shop that smelled like nothing and burned like everything. The candles tunneled. For those who don't know: tunneling is when the candle burns down the center and leaves a wall of unmelted wax around the edge, which looks like a failure and is. The problem is wick size. Too small a wick, too large a candle. The flame can't reach the edges. The melt pool never gets wide enough. I threw out the first batch. And the second. The third was acceptable, in the way that a child's painting is acceptable — you can see what it's trying to be. By the fiftieth batch I knew what I was doing. By the hundredth I was good at it. I sell at markets now, and online, and to three shops in Bristol that reorder when they run out, which is the best compliment a product can receive. The wax I use is rapeseed, grown in Lincolnshire. Soy is cheaper. Paraffin is cheapest. Rapeseed is what I use because it burns clean and holds scent well and because the farmer who grows it is called Gerald and he sends me updates about the crop that I didn't ask for and have come to look forward to. Scent is where most people go wrong. They want the candle to smell like everything at once. Vanilla and sandalwood and sea breeze and fresh linen. I use two notes. Three at most. The candle I sell most of is beeswax and black pepper, which smells like a warm kitchen with something cooking. It doesn't smell like a Provençal farmhouse. It smells like Tuesday evening. People ask me if I miss teaching. The honest answer is that I miss the kids and I don't miss the paperwork and I don't miss the meetings about the paperwork and I especially don't miss the meetings about the meetings about the paperwork. What I have now is wax and wick and a workshop that smells good and a schedule I control and Gerald's crop reports. It's enough. More than enough. Wax and wick.