Why We Use Candelilla and Coconut Oil for Candles

January 6, 2021

Watch this video to learn from Brett why we use candelilla wax and coconut oil to craft our natural candles. He discusses:

Why we chose Candelilla and Coconut for our candles
Why we did not go with soy, palm or beeswax
Why most candles are toxic

Brett, our co-founder and chandler at Natural Zen Home Fragrance Studio explains why we chose such a unique candle wax.

"I am going to talk today about why we chose the wax that we did. When we started this process, the idea was to make a completely non-toxic candle. Paraffin is highly toxic so we obviously weren’t going to use that, even though it is the most common choice for candle making.

We looked at the idea of using palm wax, but we could not find an eco-friendly source. Palm production is responsible for great deforestation so we weren’t going to do that.

Then we looked into the idea of soy but there are very few companies out there that have pure soy wax. Most soy waxes are a blend of paraffin or some other chemical, so it is still highly toxic. Even if you find candles made of pure soy, they release a toxin called acrolien when you burn them. Soy is also the most GMO product in the world, so it is not really eco-friendly.

Next we looked at beeswax. If you get it from a local apiary, then sometimes the bees will be collecting from non pesticide crops, and sometimes from non GMO crops, but you never really know.

I wanted our wax to be indisputably eco-friendly and non-toxic. So I started with a shrub called Candelilla, that grows wild in the Texas and New Mexico area. It is one of the few plants that actually has a natural wax. Most other waxes start as an oil and go through a whole hydrolyzation process and they make them into a wax. It creates a certain amount of toxicity right in that process.

Candelilla doesn’t go through that process, it is just all natural. Candelilla is boiled in water and the wax comes to the surface. It is scooped off the surface of the water, and that is candelilla wax.

Candelilla is very hard, and because of this nobody else really uses it. I found this special form of organic coconut oil that would blend with it properly and do everything that a candle is supposed to do. Not only is it completely non-toxic in ingredients, it also burns without toxins. It doesn’t release the same kind of soot and chemicals that virtually all of the other candles out there do.

Those are the reasons that we chose to go with candelilla and coconut oil for our natural candles and wax melts.