How a beeswax flower candle is made, petal by petal

Most people assume there is a mould. It is a reasonable assumption, because that is how almost every flower shaped candle in a shop is made: you cut a silicone mould from a master, you pour wax into it, and you take out something identical every time.

There is no mould here. A beeswax flower candle of the kind I make is built the way a real flower is built, petal by petal, from the middle outwards, and the whole reason it looks the way it does is that a pair of hands decided where every one of them went.

It starts with the wax. One hundred per cent pure beeswax, nothing blended into it, no dye and no fragrance. It arrives somewhere between pale gold and warm amber depending on the season and the hive, and that colour is the colour of the finished flower. Nothing is added to correct it, which is why two pieces made months apart are not quite the same shade, and why I would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

Beeswax has a narrow window in which it can be worked. Cold, it is brittle and snaps. Hot, it is a liquid and will not hold anything. In between there is a range where it is like very firm dough: it takes a shape and keeps it, and it will bond to itself. Everything in this process happens inside that window, which is the single biggest constraint on the whole thing, because the window closes while you are working and the wax has to come back into it.

The cotton wick goes in first, because a flower cannot be threaded afterwards. Everything that follows is built around it, and where the wick sits decides where the flame will be and therefore what the finished piece will look like when it is lit.

Then the centre. The middle of a peony is not the same object as the middle of a zinnia, and getting it wrong means the whole flower reads as generic. This is the part that takes the longest to learn and the part nobody looks at.

Then petals, from the inside out. Each one is shaped individually and set against the ones already there, and each row is a little larger and a little more open than the row underneath. A flower opens outwards in life and it has to open outwards here, or it looks like a cabbage. The outermost petals are the ones people see, and they are also the thinnest and the most likely to break, so they go on last and they go on carefully.

This is the point at which the honest answer to the most common question becomes obvious. People ask why no two are the same, and the marketing answer is that each one is unique. The real answer is duller. They are not the same because a hand cannot repeat itself. Two flowers made from the same reference on the same afternoon will differ in the tilt of a petal and the depth of the centre, and there is no process available to me that would make them identical. Uniqueness here is a consequence, not a feature I designed in.

That cuts both ways, and this is the part usually left off a shop page. Sometimes a petal cracks as it is set, and if it is an outer petal it can be taken off and replaced, and if it is not, the piece starts again. Sometimes a flower is finished and it is not good, in a way that is hard to explain and obvious to look at. That one does not go in a box. The wax goes back into the pot, which is at least a mercy that beeswax allows and clay does not.

Nothing is made in advance. Every piece is made to order, which is not a scarcity tactic, it is a consequence of the above: I cannot make a shelf of identical stock because I cannot make identical anything. It also means there is a wait between your order and your parcel, and that is worth knowing before you buy for a date.

Handmade candles cover an enormous range, from a jar poured by hand on a kitchen table to this, and the word on its own tells you almost nothing. It is worth asking what the hands actually did.

So why not use a mould, if a mould is faster and cheaper and produces a reliable object? Because it produces a different object. A cast flower is a good thing and I have no argument with anybody who makes them. It is repeatable, it is even, it can be made in a set of six that match. A sculpted one cannot do any of that, and in exchange it has a slight asymmetry that reads, from across a room, as alive. Those are two different products with two different reasons to exist, and pretending one is a cheap version of the other does a disservice to both.

I think the word that fits best is sculptural. A sculptural candle is a piece of small sculpture that has a wick in it, and whether it ever gets lit is genuinely up to the person who owns it. A great many of mine will never be lit and that has stopped bothering me. A flower that sits on a table for five years has done its job.

If it is lit, the same care applies as to any open flame, and it is worth repeating rather than burying. Burn it on a heat-resistant surface. Trim the wick to about five millimetres before each use. Never leave it unattended, keep it away from children, pets and anything flammable, and do not burn it for more than four hours at a time. Let it cool completely before you move it, and keep it out of direct sunlight and away from heat when it is not in use, because a hard wax in a hot window is still a wax.

The last thing worth saying is about the flowers themselves. Everything here is copied from something real. A peony has a dense, crowded centre and outer petals that fall away almost flat. A ranunculus is layer after layer of nearly identical small petals wrapped tightly round each other, which is why it takes longer than it looks. A dahlia is geometric and slightly severe. Getting those differences right is the whole job, and it is why the range is a list of named flowers rather than a list of sizes.

There is more about what these are and why they are made this way on the sculptural flower candles page, the whole range is in the shop, and if you want a flower that is not in it, that is what custom orders are for.