Tea Lights vs Electric Burners
From Jayne's notebook
Why your wax melts might smell weaker than you expect
How a customer's question led us to test tea light burners against electric burners – and what we found.
A puzzling message
One of our customers messaged me to say that the wax melts I had sent her were not as good as the first ones she had bought a couple of months previously. As I had not changed the mix nor suppliers for the wax or oils, I wanted to get to the bottom of what was going on. This lady had not been the first to make this comment, and it just seemed odd that some people couldn't smell my scents as much as others.
During a conversation with my husband he commented:
“Are they using Electric Melters or Tea Lights?”
I didn't have an answer, so I asked the lady and she said that she normally uses tea lights but had bought a new Electric Burner, and that's what she was using now. So this got us thinking.
The test
We set up four burners: two Tea Light Burners from our range and two Electric Burners that use a Halogen lamp to melt the wax, one of which had three settings. We put the same melts in each and recorded the temperature of the wax pool once it had fully melted. Here are the results:
Tea light burnersElectric burners
What we found
As you can see, the temperature of the wax pool in the Tea Light Burners was considerably higher than in the Electric Burners. As the temperature of the pool is key to the 'throw' of the scent, this was the answer as to why the lady had less fragrance from her second melts purchase. She subsequently switched to a Tea Light burner and commented that she could now smell the new melts “just as much as before”.
Obviously we were pleased to have got to the bottom of the problem, but this has highlighted to us how important your choice of burner can be to the fragrance coming off your melts – and we hope it helps you too.
