Beeswax, soy and paraffin: what actually matters

This is the question I am asked more than any other, usually phrased as which wax is best. There is no answer to that, in the same way there is no best material for a chair. There are three common waxes, they are good at different things, and only one of them is any use for what I do.

Start with what they actually are, because the marketing tends to skip it.

Beeswax is made by bees, in the comb, and is harvested and filtered. Natural beeswax arrives as a solid that ranges from pale gold to a deep amber depending on what the bees were working, and it smells faintly of honey without anybody adding anything to it.

Soy wax is a vegetable wax, made by hydrogenating soybean oil until it is solid at room temperature. It is a modern industrial product rather than an old one, and most of what is sold as soy is a blend with other vegetable waxes to get it to behave.

Paraffin is refined from crude oil. It is the wax most candles in the world are made of, it is cheap, it is consistent from batch to batch, and it has been unfairly maligned by people selling the other two.

The first real difference is hardness. Beeswax is the hardest and has the highest melting point of the three, and soy is by some distance the softest. That single fact decides most of what follows.

It is why a sculpted flower is made of beeswax and not of soy. A petal a millimetre thick has to hold its shape in a warm room, in a car, in a shop window in July. Soy would droop. It is also why soy is so good in a jar, where nothing has to hold a shape and the softness helps it burn smoothly.

The second difference is fragrance. Paraffin carries scent better than either of the others and throws it further into a room. Soy carries it well. Beeswax carries it badly, and worse than that, it fights: the wax already smells of honey, so anything you add is a second smell arguing with the first. If a strong scent is what you want from a candle, beeswax is the wrong wax and no amount of loyalty to it will change that.

The third is colour. Paraffin takes any colour you want and holds it. Soy takes colour well and often looks slightly chalky. Beeswax is already gold, so every colour you add sits on top of gold. There is such a thing as white beeswax, but making it white means bleaching or filtering it heavily, and how far you are willing to go down that road is a judgement rather than a fact.

The fourth is price, and it is not close. Beeswax costs several times what soy or paraffin cost per kilo, because it comes out of a hive at the rate a hive produces it. There is no version of a beeswax candle that is cheap, and anybody selling one at a paraffin price is selling a blend.

Which is worth a paragraph of its own. A candle labelled beeswax blend can be mostly something else with enough beeswax in it to put the word on the front. That is not dishonest as long as the label says blend, but it is not the same product. If you want a pure beeswax candle, look for a stated percentage rather than a word. One hundred per cent means one hundred per cent, and a seller who will not say the number has told you the answer.

Now the part that most pages in this category leave out.

I am not going to tell you that beeswax purifies your air, or releases negative ions, or burns cleaner than everything else. You will find all three on a great many shop pages, including some belonging to makers I like. The evidence for them is thin to non-existent, and I am not willing to put a health claim on a page where I am asking you for money.

What is true about soot is duller and more useful. Every candle produces some. How much depends far more on the wick, the trim and the draught than on the wax. A wick left long enough to mushroom will smoke in any wax you like, and a candle burning in the path of a door will flicker and soot whatever it is made of. Trim to about five millimetres before every burn and keep it out of the draught, and you have done more for the air in the room than the choice of wax ever will.

So, plainly, where beeswax is the wrong choice.

It is wrong if the household is vegan. Beeswax is an animal product. It is not a grey area and it is not something to talk anybody round on. Soy is the obvious answer here, and there are rapeseed and coconut waxes that behave beautifully.

It is wrong if you want the room to smell of something. Buy paraffin or a paraffin blend from somebody who takes fragrance seriously, or buy soy, or buy a diffuser and be free of the compromise entirely.

It is wrong if you want a true white, or a strong colour, or a matched set in a specific shade for an event. Beeswax will fight you the whole way.

It is wrong at volume. If you need a hundred and twenty candles for tables, buy plain unscented pillars or tea lights in whatever wax is cheapest and spend the difference on the food.

And it is wrong for anybody with a genuine sensitivity to bee products. It is uncommon, but it is real, and it is not worth finding out at a dinner table.

What beeswax is right for is a smaller list, and it is the one I have built a studio on. It holds a shape that nothing else will hold, which is what makes a sculpted flower possible at all. It smells faintly of honey and of nothing else. It burns with a slightly warmer, yellower light than the other two, which is a small thing until you have both in the same room. And it is a material with an obvious origin, which matters to some people and not to others, and either position is reasonable.

One last thing, which is the least fashionable answer to the original question. The wax matters less than the making. A well-made paraffin candle with the right wick for its diameter will burn better, look better and last longer than a badly made beeswax one at three times the price. Ask what the wick is, ask whether the wax is stated as a percentage, and ask who made it. Those three questions will tell you more than the name of the wax ever will.

If you want to see what beeswax makes possible when it is not in a jar, that is the whole of the sculptural flower candles page, the making of one is described in how a beeswax flower candle is made, and the range itself is in the shop.