When your straws are stainless steel, your shopping bag is recycled cotton and you can’t stand the idea of using products tested on animals, it comes naturally to look for alternative options to paraffin candles. Because you loooove the un-replicable cosiness of candlelight evenings and you don’t want to get rid of everything nice in your life just because you care so deeply about other’s.
But you also know that burning paraffin wax is basically the same as burning petrol, or oil; it produces the same pollutants and toxic yuck that our poor Earth and all it’s habitants have to suffer from in massive doses anyway. Obvious no-no to anyone who is even a tiny but conscious about environmental and personal health.
So you google, and you find the holy grail of modern candle making: soy wax.
That’s what we did, too. We were convinced (for a little while) that soy wax candle is the best thing after sun salutation and avocado smoothy.
But when we dug a bit deeper - which is something we always do in our attempt to find the best, the healthiest and the most sustainable solutions -, we realised that nah, soy wax is NOT that great.
Yes, it is waaaaay better than paraffin in terms of toxic waste, cleanliness and burning time, but very far from the ethical and sustainable production that we also find super important to consider. Not to mention that we found that the vast majority of soy waxes are made from genetically modified soybeans.
So, the main things that turned us off from using soy wax is the production and sourcing of its base product, the beans. Read more here: https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/the-story-of-soy
tropical deforestation (behind beef, soy is the second largest agricultural driver of deforestation worldwide)
habitat loss (When these native habitats are lost, it leaves wildlife without homes, accelerates climate change, leads to more water pollution, disrupts rain, and prolongs drought.)
shipping it in from faraway lands
GMO
It became unquestionable that we won’t use soy wax, even if that is the most popular solution on today’s candle market. We like to swim against the tide.
What we’ve found instead is a wax made of something that is
widely grown in Europe,
no rainforests and savannas are destroyed for production,
doesn’t have to travel all around the world to reach us,
It’s fully renewable,
it’s oil is used for human consumption and also as biodiesel, the by product is used for animal feed or as an excellent fertiliser, so it produces hardly any waste
and when it’s oil is hydrogenised, it makes fantastic wax for candles that is also biodegradable and if it spills, it can be cleaned with hot water and soap.
It IS the holy grail of candle wax.
You would never guess what it is….
It’s Rapeseed! And Coconut waxes!
We love how it’s all natural, burns long without releasing carbon and toxic stuff in the air, it also has amazing scent throw – that soy is lacking btw. But what we love the most is how sound we can sleep knowing that we are not contributing to destroying our world, no native habitats are getting lost and leaving wildlife without homes, no communities are losing their livelihoods for our candles.
The only thing we don’t like about rapeseed wax is that it’s much trickier to work with than soy. This wax makes us work harder to reap it’s benefits. But it’s all worth it.
We’ve spent hours and hours on research and development to make our rapeseed candles look great and smell amazing too apart from being overall awesome. In the process we discovered that mixing our main ingredient with a bit of coconut wax (which in itself deserves an article, again pure and non-commercialised like our rapeseed wax is), makes our candles even more amazing.
Since we love everything about coconut, being able to use a bit of it made us feel extra fuzzy – because in itself it wasn’t that great, we had to sadly admit after experimenting with that too.
So there. This is how NAKEnDLE wax was born.
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