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Candle making
All Containers›Shop by use case›Candle making›Pouring a batch›Adding dyeShop all candles →
Pouring a batch

Adding dye

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

A short step with two traps: dosing by eye, and judging the color in the pot.

After the wax, before the fragrance

Dye goes into fully melted wax at melt temperature, where it has heat and time to disperse.

Fragrance goes in later, at the lower addition temperature. Adding both together means one of them is at the wrong temperature.

Stir dye until there is no streaking at all. Powder in particular needs longer than feels necessary, and undispersed powder shows as speckle and can clog a wick.

Dosing

By weight, as a percentage of the batch, even though the percentages are small.

"A few drops" and "half a block" are not specifications, and dye blocks vary. A color you cannot reproduce is a color you cannot sell as a range.

Start lower than you think. It is easy to add and impossible to remove.

Judging the color

Never in the pot. Liquid wax is dramatically darker than the set candle, often by several shades.

Pour a spoonful onto white card, let it set, and judge that in daylight. It takes a minute and it is the difference between a range that matches and one that drifts.

Keep a swatch candle of every approved color to match against.

Dye is a retest

Worth repeating because it is the variable people assume is cosmetic: dye is a solid the wick has to draw through, and a heavily dyed candle frequently needs a different wick from the undyed version.

Test the colored candle you are going to sell, not the clear one you developed.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for candles, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from the federal regulation, the CPSC material and the published scope of the ASTM candle standards. The standards themselves are copyrighted documents that must be bought; what is described here is their scope and requirements as published, not their text. Your own burn testing against your own vessel and wick is what establishes whether a candle you made is safe.