The Pour
One candle, measured not guessed, from cold wax to cooled tin.
A pour is four steps, in this order. Heat the wax past its melting point. Cool it back down to the fragrance-load temperature. Add fragrance and stir for two full minutes. Pour into a warmed vessel inside the pour window.
Every step of that sequence is a temperature you can read on the probe. The diagram opposite is the one I keep printed on the wall above my bench. Learn the four bands and you can skip most of the folklore.
Heat, then cool
Melt to 80°C, which is above the melt point of every common container wax by a comfortable margin. This gets the wax fully liquid and gives you a clean starting state. Do not push past 85°C. That is where soy starts to discolour and where most fragrances lose their top notes.
Now let it cool. Off the heat, uncovered, stirring gently every minute. You are aiming for the fragrance-load temperature the manufacturer specifies. For most soy blends that is 75–82°C. Coconut-apricot and beeswax blends run cooler. Check the technical data sheet, not the marketing copy.
Adding fragrance
Weigh the fragrance. Do not measure by volume. Fragrance density varies by roughly 20 percent between oils, so a spoon of vanilla and a spoon of citrus are not the same load. The weighing diagram on this page shows a 10 percent load: 200 g of wax gets 20 g of fragrance oil.
Stir for two minutes. Not thirty seconds, not until it looks mixed. Two minutes. This is the step that decides whether the fragrance is bound into the wax or sitting on top waiting to bloom out during cure.
The pour window
Pour between 60–68°C for soy, cooler for coconut blends, warmer for paraffin. Pour too hot and the wax will pull away from the glass as it contracts, giving you wet spots. Pour too cool and the top will set before the sides, giving you sinkholes and a lumpy surface.
Warm the vessel first. A hairdryer on the outside of the glass for thirty seconds takes the chill off and dramatically reduces wet spots. This is the single change that turned my failure rate from one in three to one in ten.
The pour window is not a suggestion. It is where the physics of contraction and adhesion actually live.
The candle anatomy diagram on this spread names every part of what you have just poured. Learn the vocabulary now. In the next section you will be pattern-matching defects to the parts they came from.