Wick Selection Guide
Pick your wax and measure the inside of your jar. This reproduces the published container chart figures exactly, so you know which wicks to buy for testing.
It will not tell you your final wick. Nothing can, until somebody burns your fragrance in your jar.
1 What wax are you pouring?
2 Inside diameter of the vessel
These are the source chart's own bands, unaltered. Measure the inside at the height the wax sits, not the rim.
Buy three, not one
The size above, plus one up and one down. A single candle tells you nothing, because when it burns wrong you have no idea which direction you are wrong in.
Pour three identical candles. Same wax, same oil, same load, same jar, differing only by wick. Cure them equally. Burn all three side by side, same room, same draft, four hours.
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pool has not reached the glass at 3 to 4 hours | Too small. Tunnelling gets worse every burn. |
| Flame much over 2 cm, dancing, flickering | Too big. This is where soot comes from. |
| Pool deeper than about 1.5 cm | Too big. A pool should be shallow and wide, not a well. |
| Glass too hot to hold comfortably | Too big. That is a safety answer, not a preference. |
| Mushrooming carbon ball on the wick | Usually too big, sometimes too much fragrance. |
| Full pool at 3 to 4 hours, steady flame, warm glass | That is your wick. |
Everything a chart cannot see
- Your fragrance oil. Different oils burn differently at the same load. This is the big one.
- Fragrance load. Past roughly 8% the oil starts competing with the wick rather than feeding it. If the pool stalls at a high load, go up a size before blaming the wax.
- Dye. Pigment clogs a wick. Dyed candles often want a step up.
- Vessel material. Thick glass holds heat, thin glass sheds it, metal behaves differently again.
- Cure time. A candle burned at two days is not the candle you are shipping.
- The room. A draft widens a pool unevenly and makes a correct wick look wrong.
Where these numbers come from
A published per wax container chart, reproduced cell for cell. Nothing is averaged, rounded, converted between series or carried across from a neighbouring wax.
The chart covers the CD and ECO series for these waxes. It does not cover every series on the market, and where it is silent so are we.
These are starting points for testing, not test results of ours.