Scents & Scentsibilities

Colors are sometimes the bane of our existence. We thought we’d explain colors and candlemaking a little more thoroughly, because it’s a topic that comes up fairly often for us.

Case in point…Cinnamon. You might notice that this scent has been renamed recently on our site. We used to call it Cinnamon Red Hots, and now it’s just called Cinnamon. The actual scent, however, is exactly the same. It’s fairly common knowledge in the candlemaking community that cinnamon fragrance oil does bizarre things to dye when it’s mixed in wax. For whatever reason, the color always seems to turn a sort of fuschia pink. It’s maddening! We counteract this by adding a bit of green to the red dye, but half the time it still seems like the color looks more hot pink than red.

You’d think we could just keep adding red dye til the color looks truly red, but there comes a point when you have to set the dye bottle down and back away slowly. The wick will become clogged if you use too much dye, and the candle won’t burn properly.

We decided to change the color to ‘brick red’ so that we can add a touch of brown and burgundy and achieve a color that looks a little more true to cinnamon than fuschia pink. After all, a cinnamon stick is more brown than red, and so is the grated spice.

So…why don’t we have a color chart showing the colors that we make? There’s so many reasons, we almost don’t know where to begin!

• Computer monitors display color differently. What looks like dark blue on our monitor may look like black on yours, depending on your resolution and other settings.
• Every candle we make uses a completely different wax (i.e., votives, pillars, melts and container candles). Each of these waxes treats colors differently. If we used one drop of blue dye in 6 ounces of container wax, it would look much more pastel than in votive or pillar wax.
• We use two different types of dye: liquid and solid block, which is shaved off in small increments. Because we make every candle at the time of the order, we don’t keep huge quantities of already-made candles in stock. If someone orders two votives, we’ll make two votives and shave off a bit of block of dye to color them. If that same person comes back and orders 200 votives in the same scent, the color will be different because we’ll use liquid dye (better for large batches) and it will be a different shade.
• Fragrance oil affects color (see the cinnamon anecdote above). Fragrance oil can be clear or almost a dark brown color, yellow or nearly orange. The tint of the fragrance oil will completely affect the dyed color of the candle. This is why we can’t make certain candle scents in a light purple color, for instance — if the fragrance oil is fairly yellow, it mixes with the purple dye and turns it a gray color. To override that yellow fragrance oil tint, we have to add enough purple dye that the color ends up being more of a deep medium purple shade.

On a happier note, we are a company that specializes in custom hand-poured candles…which means that if you have a color you’d like us to match for your candles, we can almost always do it! We just need a color sample to work with, and we ask that you snail-mail it to us because of the aforementioned problems with computer monitors and how they display color. We’ve matched candles to bridesmaid dresses, flowers, even wallpaper!