Don’t Burn Your Candles! There’s a Better Way to Use Them.
This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.
As an adult, I have often aspired to be the type of person who lights a giant candle without giving it another thought. Alas, I am not and will never be that girl. Despite my many attempts to bask in the fragrant glow of a candle after a stressful day, I often spend more time worrying about burning down my home than I do relaxing. Luckily, my thirtysomething women group chat intervened last summer with a life-changing recommendation: the candle warmer.
Unlike the usual method of activating a candle by lighting the wick, candle warmers use a halogen bulb to melt the candle from above. Although the bulb heats up enough to melt the wax down, at no point is there an open flame, making it undeniably safer than the alternative. There’s no wafting black smoke or potential for rogue soot. It’s basically just a small lamp. Even better, most candle warmers come with an on/off timer you can set and forget, negating the panic of spending the evening trying to figure out if you remembered to blow out your candle before leaving home.
As a naturally anxious person, I imagine that the flame-elimination properties would have been enough to persuade me to buy a candle warmer, but I also love that it makes my candles last two or three times longer than they typically would. It’s a lot easier to justify the hefty price tag of a quality candle from my favorite local boutique when it lasts for 20 long, luxurious uses instead of 10. And the candle warmer allows me to use a candle down to its last drop of wax rather than abandoning the bottom 15 percent after I keep burning my hand trying to light the buried end of the wick burrowed in a tunnel of sooty wax. I just put the near-empty candle under the lamp and let it melt all the way down. This makes it easier to repurpose fancy candle canisters as decorative containers around the house too.
I was also pleased to discover that the candle warmer lives up to its claim of producing a stronger scent than a lit candle does. In the past, I’ve tiptoed a lit candle, in 30-minute increments, from kitchen to bathroom to living room to bedroom like an 1800s peasant woman in order to evenly disperse the scent throughout my apartment. But now one candle warmer in the living room distributes the scent throughout my entire place. That said, I love using my candle warmer so much that I’ve already bought a second one, just for the convenience of it. I mean, why not? Thanks to the longer burn time, I’m saving a lot of money on candles.
