Resources

What is an intention candle?

Category: Resources

You’ve seen them at the store, read about them in articles, and come across them on social media. People everywhere and from all walks of life are using intention candles to help them level up and live their best lives. But what exactly are intention candles? How do you use them? And, maybe most importantly, are they right for you? To answer that last question, absolutely. Intention candles are right for EVERYBODY! Now let’s answer those other two questions…

What exactly are intention candles?

Every candle has a purpose. Some candles are used to make your house smell nice ahead of company. Some are used for light when the power goes off. Some are used to make wishes as you blow out their flames from atop a birthday cake. In a way, intention candles are most like the birthday cake variety.

How do you use them?

Intention candles are candles that help people achieve the optimal state of mind to manifest their goals, overcome a challenge, or solve a problem. They can be used as part of a daily ritual, cultural ceremony, meditation session, or for occasional/as-needed inspiration and motivation. How people choose to use intention candles is as personal as the results they wish to achieve. But, for many, it can be as simple as lighting an intention candle that corresponds to their specific goal and reciting a few meaningful words of inspiration.

While intentional candles might look similar to other candles (a tube of wax with a wick running through the center), true intention candles aren’t just your garden variety, generic, grocery store candles. They are each specially formulated to help with a specific goal or challenge using time-tested herbs and oils. While the exact recipes might differ from candlemaker to candlemaker, authentic intention candles are all based on ingredients that have been passed down from generation to generation and found to be effective in manifesting their respective intentions.

Intention candles come in all different colors, scents, shapes and sizes. There are pillar candles, container candles (in their own glass or metal holders), and even figure candles in the form of, well, pretty much anything and everything. And, if that’s not enough, there are even differences in the types of wax used. Intention candles can be made from paraffin, soy, beeswax, and more. You can read more about the differences and what goes into Coventry Creations intention candles here.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to be a witch or magic practitioner to use intention candles. Intention candles can help bring out the magic in anyone because everybody has a little magic in them.

Want to learn more about candle magic?

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Jacki Smith, founder of Coventry Creations, shares her magical secrets with readers, enabling them to empower themselves through successful spell casting. Her book explains the nature of magic spells and provides examples for a wide variety of purposes including love, money, healing, and protection, liberally punctuated with tips from "Aunt Jacki," deriving from her many years of experience

Paraffin vs Soy

Category: Resources

Several years ago, amidst all the rage about soy wax, we were on the brink of changing our candle production over to soy. I had a biochemist, nutritionist and a few environmentalists help me sort out all the information I was getting through my research. After a two-month study of the impact of paraffin vs. soy, we made our decision to stay with paraffin because, we felt, there was less of an impact on the environment. We are really aware that our view is not the popular one, but it is based on our own research and not the industry "studies" that will always skew the results into their favor.

Here is a quick list of our deciding factors:

All reports referenced in the media tracked back to the study that was financed by the soy wax industry. I was only able to find two independent reports on the toxins released from soy and paraffin candles. The independent reports showed less than one part per million difference in the toxins released from the different waxes. They used unscented wax with the same cotton wick.
Soy wax is soft and requires a container to be a candle. All soy wax pillars are a combination of soy and paraffin. The companies that are claiming a soy wax pillar are not telling you that they combine paraffin with it to make it hard. When I interviewed soy wax suppliers around the country to find a soy pillar wax with no paraffin they all concurred: the product does not exist.
Fragrance: More toxins are released in a poor-quality fragrance than are ever released from paraffin. At Coventry, we work closely with our perfumer to make fragrance blends that are not toxic to the environment. There are even essential oils that, used in quantity, release toxins into the air. Knowing that this is a bigger health impact than the type of wax we use, we keep our percentage of fragrance to wax at a level that smells great, but will not induce an immediate allergic reaction.
Smoke: The amount of smoke that comes from a candle is determined by the amount of fragrance and the size of the wick. Large candles, even when they have a properly balanced wick-to-candle diameter, will smoke. Soy wax does smoke, and although the industry says that the smoke is white, I have personally experienced it as black.
Paraffin: This is a natural by-product of the oil industry. As long as there is oil, there is paraffin. Before the candle industry took off, paraffin was dumped or warehoused by the oil companies. The increase of the candle industry has turned the sale of paraffin into a money-making venture for the oil companies, so they are no longer dumping it. Crude oil is never pumped for paraffin; paraffin is created to keep the oil pure. They extract 99.96% of all crude out of wax and, if they could get that last 0.04%, they would.
Soy: Soy and corn are the most over-farmed crops in the world. Soy wax comes from industrial farming (Monsanto GMO crops) and not from the independent farmers. Actually, some soy used in wax comes from countries where they do not have the same restrictions on pesticides and GMO crops as they do in the USA and Canada. I have personally talked to farmers who have been put out of business by large, corporate farms whose (among others) major crop is soy. When soy wax is made, there is a high percentage of soy solids that don’t go into the wax. This by-product is fed to cattle as an abundant and cheap feed. There are studies being done on the impact of overfeeding soy to cattle, and the ramifications of genetic manipulation carried out on cows to enable them to handle that much soy in their diets.
The cost of making soy wax: Just like making ethanol, there is a cost to making soy wax and the energy required to grow and process the wax does not compare to the potential fossil fuel savings of using a soy candle. Keeping things in perspective, starting your car one time puts more fossil fuels into the environment than burning a candle every day for a year.
Cost: Soy costs two-to-three times more than paraffin and requires special handling. Soy wax cannot be reused and recycled in production as paraffin can, causing much more waste and using more electricity to pour the candles properly.

This information only scratched the surface of what I uncovered and, shockingly enough, the effects of soy on the human body are even worse. Coventry is not anti-soy; we have done our homework and have made sure we know the pros and cons of the materials we use.

Blessings!

Jacki Smith
President
Coventry Creations

A Blend of Oils

Category: Resources

A question was posed to us at Coventry about how we blend our fragrances. This is a twofold matter: how we create fragrances, and how they are delivered for our enjoyment. Fragrances are volatile, which means that they evaporate constantly into the air and make themselves available to us all day long. The blend has layers and each layer helps us experience the fragrance both as a whole and as parts. If you pay attention, you can experience the fragrance blends several different ways at different times.

a-blend-of-oils We smell the top note first, because that is the part of the fragrance blend that is released first. Top notes are energetic and fleeting. They last just a few minutes before receding and blending with the second layer (or the “heart note”). Top notes are the personality of the blend. Additionally, the top note is often called the “wake-up” scent because it uplifts and helps us feel alert. The list of top note oils is long. Some of our favorites are florals (geranium, gardenia and chamomile); spices (cinnamon and clove); citrus (lemon, bergamot, lime and tangerine); fruits (melon and raspberry); and greens scents (lavender, rosemary, and sage).

Slinking up behind the top note is the heart note. It takes its time coming to full bloom—almost ten minutes—but lasts for hours. Its job is to support and balance the base note and keep the personality of the fragrance (top note) stable. We respond to heart notes emotionally because they calm and center us. They are feel-good scents and that is why we call them heart notes. They are all from the floral family and some of our favorites are carnation, jasmine, orange blossom, peony, rose, ylang ylang, and tuberose.

The base note acts as a bridge for the top and heart notes. It bonds the entire fragrance together and gives it depth. Like music, a base note is needed to carry the song. The base note oils prolong our experience of the fragrance. We feel grounded and relaxed when we smell them. This is why we make sure there are base notes in all our blends. Our spiritual connections really rely on us being relaxed and in our bodies. Some of our favorite base notes are balsam, benzoin, cedarwood, frankincense, myrrh, patchouli, sandalwood, vanilla and vetiver.

The perfumer’s job is to create a scent that blends the top, middle, and base notes so they complement each other and work together. When one note is overpowering, the blend feels out of balance and does not give us that rich, multi-dimensional sensory experience.

Next time you smell a candle, see if you can pick out the top, middle, and base notes. Like tasting fine wine, savor the scent at the back of your throat and wait for the different scents make themselves known. This is practice also reduces stress, because you are slowing down and letting the world fall away as you focus on the overall blend, and then each layer of the scent. Happy sniffing!