One of the most common queries we receive from our customers is regarding how our candles – both our luxury scented candles and our unscented candles – are made. As more and more industries become mechanized, some may suspect that our candles are only the result of an automated process, with minimal handcrafting or individual care. Many products, after all, are made purely on an assembly line, where the most prolonged interaction between the candles and the candlemaker is the quality check.
This, of course, is not true of Charles Farris. Our candles are still made the way that we’ve made them from the beginning – dipped, trimmed, and polished by hand. It’s this attention to detail that makes our candles so high quality – both our luxury scented candles and our unscented candles. If you’ve ever burned one of our candles, you’ll know that they burn cleanly and evenly, and last far longer than you might expect!
Our candlemakers first cut the wicks by hand and hang them up on the spokes of a large wheel. That wheel is then lowered, and the wicks dipped evenly into a vat of wax. This enormous vat will hold a tonne of wax – it takes twenty-four hours to melt it all!
This process of dipping is repeated many times until the candles reach the correct width. They are then left to solidify. This can be quite challenging during the hottest part of the summer, when none of the wax wants to set. As such, the production times can vary greatly depending on the weather – a far cry from assembly line production!
After the candle is solid enough to handle, the bottom is carefully trimmed down with a rotary saw to ensure that it will sit evenly in your candlestick. After a quick trim of the wick, the candle is ready to be polished and packaged. Since this finishing process is completed by hand, only the most perfect candles are chosen to be sold.
