As a beginner or professional candle maker, the goal is to make each candle unique and personal with out of the box solutions and creative ideas. Apart from using colouring additives and essential or fragrance oils, there are quite a few opportunities for you to personalize your candles. These methods can be advantageous for your business as well as fun when you feel like playing with your candles. One of these options would be to use herbs as a nice decoration and for a stronger scent. They are great options as additives as you can easily find them in stores and can use a great variety of them. But before you run purchasing dries herbs, let’s see how to make candles with herbs!
How to use herbs?
To begin with, we should discuss how to use herbs in a safe way. As lighting a candle can be a safety hazard, you always have to make sure to end up with perfectly safe and good quality candles. This is the case when you want to decorate your candles with props as well. Generally, it is safe to add herbs as decoration but you need to know the two basic rules. Firstly, you definitely can’t add the herbs into your melted wax in the beginning of the process. As this way you would risk putting the herbs close to the wick which will be a fire hazard. In order to avoid faulty candles, sprinkle your herbs on your candle after it is already poured in the container.
Secondly, for the same reason, you shouldn’t put the herbs too close to the wick on top of the candle to avoid fire risks. Try adding them on the edges of the candle instead. This will make the process a bit longer and more difficult, but will result in a safe and decorative candle. Alternatively, you can add the dries herbs to the side of the container before pouring the wax. This is also a longer procedure, but will make your candles even more aesthetic. You can do that by simply gluing them on the inside of the jar.
Experimenting is the fun part of it, so you can mix these methods and create more patterns and variations. You can use dried flower petals and leaves too and add them according to your own style. You can play with the colors and shapes, mixing different plants and flowers. If you keep the rules above, you can’t go wrong with it.
How to choose your herbs?
Now that we know the safe way to do it, let’s see which herbs you can choose. Obviously, there is no strict rule so you can be more creative with this. But similarly to essential and fragrance oils, there are certain herbs which should be used for certain moods and effects which are worth knowing. Let’s see the most popular herbs you can use for unique and perfect candles!
Lavender
This calming herb is perfect for candles made to support relaxing as it can relieve stress, headaches and insomnia. You can therefore enhance the effect of lavender essential oil by adding dried lavender on top of your candles. Obviously, it will make your candle even prettier too.
Mint
Mint candles are known for easing muscle pain, digestive problems and headaches as well. Furthermore, it has a strong scent which can eliminate unwanted odours in your home. So don’t be afraid of its strong scent but be careful with the added amount of it.
Rosemary
Rosemary is a very useful herb which has several health benefits. This is the reason why rosemary essential oil is really popular in candle making – but you don’t have to stick to only the oil. Adding this amazing herb as decoration can create a unique design for your candle and add an even stronger scent and effect to it. Rosemary can improve your focus and memory, help relieve pain and boost circulation as well. All these features make it a perfect choice for your candles!
Thyme
This herb has a strong and unique leathery scent but that doesn’t mean that in smaller amounts you can’t add it to your candles. Thyme is known to be an antibacterial and anti-inflammatory herb so its healthy benefits are important as well.
Chamomile
Adding chamomile to your candle will make it an amazingly decorative gift. With its subtle fragrance, you can easily mix it with different fragrance oils as it won’t ruin their scent. Chamomile is known for its stress reliever effect as it is used in therapy for calming and supporting the nervous system. So, it is a great choice for candles against stress and insomnia.
Anise
The sweet liquorice scent of anise makes it a perfect additive to your scented candle. As it has a unique and rather strong scent, you should be careful when adding it or mixing it with different essential or fragrance oils. But this shouldn’t stop you from using it to make perfect candles!
As you can see, there are several options allowing you to be more creative when making candles. Of course, you can find so much more variety so you don’t have to tick to this list. Be creative and try new scents and combinations. As the most popular herbs are easy to purchase and cheap, it’s not a big investment for your candle making business. Moreover, the unique candles that you can end up with will definitely worth the longer process of adding small pieces of herbs to your candles.
All things considered, adding fresh of dried herbs to your homemade candles can be a creative and unique way of making scented candles. If you know which herb can be used for certain problems or effects, you can’t go wrong with using a bit every now and then. So let’s use your creative side and start experimenting!
