How To Make A Dripless Candle

After you’ve been making candles for a while, you may want to take a few stabs at dripless candles. While you can make a dripless candle out of just about anything—the most common dripless candles are taper candles that are in a taper holder or candelabra. Before you get started, make sure to organize your workspace and make sure all your tools are handy.

Gather The Ingredients

In order to create the perfect dripless candle, you’ll need to make sure you do the following two things:

• The wick must consume ALL of the melted wax before it has a chance to drip over the edge.
• The candle must melt down the middle only, leaving a hollow rim/tube to hold all of the melted wax.

In order to accomplish this, you’ll have to find the perfect combination of wick and wax. Though any type of candle can be made dripless, you’ll have to make sure that the wick is exactly the right size for the wax and mold used. After you’ve made your candle mold and dripless wick—you’ll have to start refining and testing until you get it perfect. This may take a few go-arounds, but it’ll all start to come together.

In order to get the candle dripless, you’ll have to overdip it. This is easily done with hand-dipped tapers. In addition, you should note that any non-round candle will not burn evenly so it’s a waist to try anything but a round candle or pillar. 

After you’ve molded or dipped your round/pillar candle, you’ll want to use wax with a melt point of 135°-145°. If you’re worried about the wax—don’t be. Most of your taper and pillar blend waxes will automatically fall in this range. When the candle is cool, you can then over dip it.

Overdipping Your Candles

When you prepare to s tart overdipping your candles, know that there are two ways to do it. You can either use a pre-blended “hurricane” or “over dip” wax, which will have a high melt point of 160°-170° or you use a wax additive, which will effectively increase the melt point of your wax.

The second thing you should be aware of is the room you allow yourself for dipping.  If there is room in your melt pot to dip the entire candle in, you should keep it there. Otherwise, you will need to improvise. You can also play around with different colors by using a different color for overdipping than you did with the original mold.