The books / Candle Making / chapter 11 of 14
Bloom is not a flaw
All chapters
- The hardest of the waxes
- Never above eighty-five
- The wick chart
- The burn test
- Reading the pool
- Rolled tapers
- Dipped tapers
- Votives and tealights
- Pillars and the topping pour
- Container candles and the cure
- Bloom is not a flaw
- Rushing the melt
- Balms, salves, wraps and polish
- What a kilo is worth as candles
Leave a beeswax candle sitting for a while, especially somewhere cool, and you will often see a soft white haze spread across its surface. That is bloom, sometimes called frosting, and it is one of the things a new candle maker worries about most and one of the least worth worrying over.
Bloom is simply wax crystallising at the surface as the candle ages, and other waxes with additives or blends do not show it the way pure beeswax does. Rather than a defect, it is closer to a signature: a candle that blooms is telling you it is genuinely beeswax, not a cheaper blend wearing beeswax's colour.