The Internet Recommends Freezing Your Candles. We Don’t.
After waiting for wax to melt for a good six hours, a few themes emerged, none of which were promising for the hack’s success.
First, freezing led to both kinds of candles breaking. The paraffin candle’s base snapped after the first freeze. And while the beeswax candle made it through the first freeze intact, its base fractured after the second.
It turns out that these fractures weren’t flukes: Freezing candles does make them more brittle. When I reached out over email to the National Candle Association (NCA) about the cracking, a representative explained that “wax naturally expands when heated and contracts when cooled.” So moving it in and out of the freezer “can cause the wax to expand rapidly, potentially leading to the formation of cracks.” This can affect the integrity of the wax and expose more of the wick than intended, leading to high flames and uneven burning.
Second, the impact of freezing on dripping was inconclusive. If anything, freezing the candles before lighting them appeared to increase dripping.
Sometimes a candle that had never been frozen was the first to drip, but by the end of two hours, all of the candles had dripped. And in the final round, when I introduced a fan to the room, the pre-frozen candles dripped the most. This might be due in part to uneven air movement in the room, but there was no clear improvement on dripping for the pre-frozen candles in any of my tests — fan or no fan. Also, as the NCA rep noted, freezing and refreezing your candles can expose the wick to moisture, which can affect the way the candle burns.
Finally, after six hours of burn testing, you could barely tell the candles apart. The unfrozen paraffin candle from Yummi was marginally taller than the frozen Yummi candle at the end of testing (about a quarter of an inch difference), indicating that freezing had slightly increased the burn rate. The beeswax candles from Lomar Farms ended up burning to the same height.
In the end, I found that freezing the candles made a marginal difference in burn time, and it was certainly not enough to be worth the extra effort (or freezer space).
