How To Make Your Own Soy Candles So You Can Zen Out And Save The Environment At The Same Time

Sure, you could swing by the shops and spend your hard-earned dollarydoos on soy candles for your self-care evenings, or you can learn how to make your own soy candles and cement your status as a DIY queen.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you make yourself a stunning soy candle.

What is soy wax?

Okay first up, what the heck is soy wax? Fair question! Soy wax is a natural product made up of vegetable soybeans. Soybean oil is extracted from the flakes and the leftovers are used for animal feed, which is noice for our animal friends, isn’t it?

In comparison, ordinary candles usefully use paraffin wax because it’s the cheapo option and it’s made using the oil purification process, featuring ingredients like petroleum, coal, or oil shale, none of which is ideal, really.

Why should you use soy wax instead of paraffin wax?

Well first of all there’s the obvious one, soy wax is made from environmentally friendly resources that are also renewable and breakdown easier. Meanwhile typical paraffin wax, which is what the plebs use, is made from petroleum and is not, I repeat, NOT renewable. No bueno.

But that’s not the only benefit, soy candles also take longer to burn down, so you’ll have much more burning time.

Also, when most candles burn down, you’re usually left with heaps of gross soot, whereas soy candles emit less soot and not only that, but they also smell much nicer and, well, isn’t that the point of all this? Your candle will essentially act as a vibe setter AND an incense, in essence (ha), as it will fill the room with a lovely scent.

Broad City soy candle

Now without any further ado, here’s that step-by-step guide to making your own scented soy candles that I promised you.

What you need to make a soy candle:

These are all the ingredients you’ll need in order to make your fabulous soy candle.

  • A heat resistant container
  • A wooden wick
  • A thermometer
  • A jug (for pouring the wax)
  • A wick holder
  • Fragrance oil (any scent will do)
  • Soy wax flakes

How to make a soy wax candle?

Alrighty-roo, let’s gets into it now, shall we? Here’s an easy-as, step-by-step guide to making a soy candle.

1. Melt the wax

Pop two full scoops of unmelted wax in a heat-resistant pot and simmer on a double-boiler.

2. Get your wick ready

Position the wick in the middle of the container, ensuring that it’s centred. Keep an eye on it throughout the process as it can move around until it’s set and you want that bad boy riiiiight in the middle.

3. Insert fragrance oil

When the wax is at 80 degrees Celsius (it should be filling the whole pot at this point), remove it from the heat and decant it into your pouring jug, then add fragrance oil (6-10% fragrance oil to grams of melted wax) and stir for roughly 2 mins.

Hot tip (literally) #1: Don’t add too much fragrance or it will screw with the stability of the wax and the burn may end up being overly fast and smokey, which is not what you want.

Hot tip (literally) #2: This is the fun part where you can choose the scent for your candle! When selecting fragrance oils, pay close attention to what the scent is as this is the aura your candle will give off when you light ’em up.

4. Craft your soy candle

Wait ’til the wax has cooled down to 55 degrees Celsius (obvs using your thermometer), then you can pour it into your container to form the soy candle.

5. Set and forget

Now that your soy candle has been fully assembled, leave it for a full day before usage. Once the 24 hours are up, burn baby burn.

Here’s the deal, unless you’re a total DIY queen, the chances are, it’ll take a few tries before you make an 11/10, perfect, fuck off, show-stopping soy candle that could easily be sold on Etsy for top dollar and ultimately make you a billionaire (move over, Elon Musk).

It’ll probably take a few tries, and a few piece of shit candles before you reach that god tier-level. Sure, it’s a science, but there’s obvs a lot of experimenting involved which, in turn, will result in some trial and error. Be super patient and don’t give up the good fight!

Then, when you finally nail the magic formula and craft that picture-perfect soy candle, you’ll wanna make sure you can recreate it again and again, so be sure to take notes as you go along. I like to take piccies on my iPhone so I have a visual record of what the candle should look like at certain points throughout the process.

Keep a log of notes from each batch. Hell, even start a soy wax journal. Whatever werks for you, bb!

Then before you know it, you’ll be a soy candle queeeeeeeeen.

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