I have always loved a great smelling home. Whether its vanilla or cinnamon that wafts through the oven vents when baking, oil diffusers with bamboo sticks that make the home smell a little bit more like heaven, or (and my personal favorite) luxury candles of all sizes and scents for each and every occasion and ambiance and room in the house, I adore them all. I love walking into my home smelling just so, and over the years I have invested a good chunk on luxury candles from Paris and London and New York. It has been my thing!
Until this past Winter, when quite serendipitously, a google search led me down quite a dark path.
Let me preface by saying that we, like many families we know, are rather religious about the quality of what our family, and especially our children, eat, breath, watch and learn... we care deeply about what nourishes their body, brain, and soul. We research new purchases ad nauseam, fret about the quality of the paint we apply to our walls and the glue that is holding our hardwoods down, make a small pilgrimage to find undisputed safe fish for eating... So you can imagine my feeling of utter
dread when I found out some months ago, that the very luxury expensive candles that I was burning in our home, usually with the the windows closed, were poisoning the air that we were breathing.
With a few clicks of my keyboard, I learned that most of the luxury candles on the market today are made from cheap materials such as paraffin wax, a petroleum by-product of crude oil - a carcinogenic (such as my personal favorite), or soy - which with 93% of soy production being genetically modified and heavily treated with pesticides, chances are that it contains toxic compounds. Then again, soy is not a wax, and in order to produce soy wax, the beans must be put through a rigorous chemical process of hydrogenation, with its own slew of side-effects and environmental footprint. Another choice of wax is Palm wax, the productions of which have had devastating environmental effects on our planet.
Worse yet, almost all of the scented candles sold today use fragrance oils, aroma oils or perfume oils, all of which are another word for a synthetically and chemically produced scent, derived mostly from petroleum products. To top it off, candle manufacturers add other chemicals such as scent binders, color enhancers, and other interesting additive to make their candles look and feel "luxurious" to consumers. To make your whole house smell amazing! In short, these candles emit hazardous toxins that research shows can cause cancer, allergies, asthma, and serious damage to development of the brain, lungs, hormones, and nervous system, especially in young children. And finally, only in recent years were the use of Lead cored-wicks banned in the US, but with no real regulation over the candle industry, its your guess whether the candles you are using have any other hazardous materials in the wick.
After talking about this to other friends, I learned that I was not alone in my alarm. Yet, we all love our scented candles, so I couldn't leave it alone.... through months of research I learned that Beeswax is the most naturally occurring and healthy wax for candles. There is even research that suggests that beeswax cleans the air and helps with allergies and asthma. But then finding clean beeswax was another eye opening journey for me. Although its quite rare to find US certified organic beeswax, with so many beautiful and sustainable bee farms across this country, you can find an abundance of "organic" beeswax from countries with questionable certification policies. Through consultation I found the highest grade US Beeswax, which I felt comfortable burning in my home. And so Pure Artisan Candles were born...
The candles are handmade in the artisanal traditions of candle making, with the purest American beeswax, and the highest quality essential oils, both of which are inherently nourishing and cleansing, with numerous health enhancing benefits.
The essential oils are 100% pure aromatic distillates from botanical sources, extracted through steam distilling or cold pressing. Candles scented by essential oils do not have an overpowering aura, they don't fill up the whole house as I was used to... they perfume your home subtly and elegantly, without releasing toxins into the air you and your loved ones breath.
Pure candles are simple, beeswax and essential oils hand-poured into a white glass container, hand-blown in India, using a 100% cotton wick.
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