About Wax Almanac

What this site is

Wax Almanac is a measurement notebook for candle wax. It records what a wax is — where it softens, where it goes clear, how much it shrinks as it sets, how hard it is at room temperature, how much fragrance oil it will hold before it sweats — and what happens to it under a controlled burn.

The site exists because most candle information on the web is written backwards: it starts from a product someone wants to sell and works back to a justification. We start from the material and stop there.

What this site deliberately does not do

Three things are out of scope, permanently:

• No fragrance formulas and no oil ratios. Fragrance load appears only as a logged variable in a burn test, never as a recipe.
• No brand recommendations and no affiliate links. A supplier grade is named only so a reader can tell two waxes apart.
• No safety certification. Nothing here substitutes for the wax supplier's own technical data sheet.

How the data is produced

Every number on the site comes from a procedure published under Protocols. If a figure has no protocol behind it, it is not published. Measurements are taken in a single room with logged temperature and humidity, on the same balance and the same calipers, so that numbers are comparable to each other. They are not comparable to a different lab's numbers, and we never claim they are.

Where a measurement is a rating rather than an instrument reading — cold throw, hot throw, soot index, mushrooming — the protocol names the panel size and the scale, and the rating is reported as the panel mean.

Corrections

If a recorded value turns out to be wrong, the record is re-measured and the page is updated with the new figure; the publish date stays, and the change is noted in the body. We do not silently edit numbers.

To flag an error, write to [email protected] with the URL and the value you believe is wrong.