How to Get Your Pillar Candle to Burn Evenly

One of the more important aspects of getting the most out of your Queen B candles is the whole question candles around minimum burn times and how to get pillars to burn evenly.

The questions were succinctly put in a lovely email I received today:

"First I just wanted to say thank you for making great candles! I recently purchased a 10x20cm candle and I enjoyed it when I first lit it.

I just want to ask a few questions because this is the first time I have had a beeswax candle after learning about non-beeswax candles and how bad they are.

So I've lit my candle once, and I burned it for three hours as the instructions said. As you can see in the photo... I thought from the instructions that the pool of wax would burn all the way to end/edge. The smaller crater is just my fingerprint seeing if the wax had cooled.

I also wanted to know why you should burn the candle for so long? I'm genuinely curious. Does something happen to the candle if you repeatedly only light it for say 30 minutes?

Kind regards..."

I thought it would be worth sharing my response to these commonly asked questions...

"Thank you for your really lovely email and for touching base BEFORE this became a disappointment!

The laws of physics dictate that if you don’t allow your candle to burn to the edge, then it won’t burn to the edge!

If you burn this particular candle with this particular wick for say the 30 minutes you indicate, it would have a pool of wax that is around 2cm wide. If you then did that again the next time, you’re now starting to get thick walls of beeswax forming around your candle and once you’d done that for the third time or so, the 2cm wide pool of wax would have 1cm walls around it which would then make it difficult for the wick to draw enough oxygen to fuel the flame and the wick would also be too short to melt the walls of wax surrounding the wick and you’d end up with your candle "tunnelling".

A couple of other tips:

your wick is leaning quite far over. The best way to put a candle out is to use the end of a poker / pen / pencil to push the burning wick into the pool of wax. This will extinguish the flame immediately and coat the wick in wax so that it doesn’t smoulder and also meaning the wick is full of fuel the next time you light your candle.

Please make sure that when you push the wick over to extinguish the flame, you use your poker to pull it back up out and centre it nicely for the next time you light your candle.
You can see from the image that you sent me that the wax is slightly thinner on the side that the wick is pointing towards. If you want a completely even look all around the wick, then make sure the wick is centred.
Please try not to stick your fingers in the wax or candle! The Neanderthal brain seems to love doing this, but it makes the candle look messy! It actually shouldn’t harm the candle at all, it just drives my perfectionistic tendencies bonkers!

Thanks again for caring enough to touch base."

I hope that helps.

On another note regarding getting your pillar candle to burn evenly and to the edge, I had a customer in the store last week asking me how she could stop her Squat Pillar from 'burning down the centre' so that there is no wick left but lots of wax remaining.

When I asked how long she typically burned it for she said less than an hour most nights. So I asked if she'd read on the packaging that she needed to burn it for a minimum of 3 hours at a time, and she had!!!! #@$%@#

We try to keep writing to a minimum on the packaging. Please read it... you'll be happy to did!