Wonky Wicks are soy wax candles scented naturally with essential oils. Glass bottles are donated to me from people and a few local businesses, and I cut them into candle vessels.
As the maker of this particular product, I’m simultaneously the best and worst person to write this post about Wonky Wick Candles. Speaking as objectively as I can on the subject, there’s three aspects of Wonky Wicks that I think lend to a particularly nice candle:
-Slow burn rate, at approximately 7 hours per oz, so the 12oz we have burns for around 85 hours.
-Essential oils. Essential oils and “natural fragrance” are entirely different, and “natural fragrance” is actually, at best, semi-synthetic. “Natural fragrance” and “derived from natural ingredients” can mean a lot of different, unregulated things, but oftentimes specific compounds found in natural ingredients (like linalool in lavender and d-limonene in orange) are isolated. Those isolated compounds will then be combined into something that smells exactly like freshly cut grass or a vanilla cupcake. Basically, it’s made from components derived from natural ingredients, but is arguably not in itself natural.
Essential oils, on the other hand, are literally the essence of concentrated oil from the plant it is extracted from. There’s a natural aromatherapeutic benefit that comes with essential oils that doesn’t exist with “natural fragrance” because the natural synergy of the plants’ multitude of compounds is compromised and picked apart.
-Repurposed bottles! Since January 2020, I’ve saved thousands of bottles and learned a lot about glass as a material. Glass is renewable and theoretically infinitely recyclable– ‘theoretically’ because the reality is a sad tale for another time. Glass is also energy intensive to make and it causes erosion from displacing large amounts of sand. For glass to be truly sustainable, we need to stop producing virgin glass and establish more effective methods to create a circular system around glass.
In a nutshell: the recyclability/sustainability of a material relies on the recycling system it exists in, which in the United States is completely and utterly broken.
Another reason I was the worst/best person to write about this is because I apparently find it impossible to talk about Wonky Wicks without venturing down the complex-and-kinda-sad rabbit hole about the recyclability of glass.
Sun Salutation-- purifying, energizing, & bright
Anyway, my favorite scent is Sun Salutation. It has eucalyptus, sage, rosemary, and some notes of citrus. It’s purifying, clarifying, people tend to say it reminds them of the spa. That was likely the reason you wanted to read a post about candles, not erosion and landfills, so I figured it was the least I could do.
