For most of history, the material of a candle told you who owned it. Beeswax burned in churches and royal households. Tallow, rendered animal fat, burned in everyone else’s kitchen. In London the split was formal: the Wax Chandlers and the Tallow Chandlers were separate trades with separate guilds, and the Wax Chandlers’ records reach back to 1199.
The small-batch candlemakers working today are, knowingly or not, picking a side in an argument about materials that’s centuries old.
Fat, rushes and the light of ordinary people
Candles are older than anyone can pin down. There are hints of them in China’s Qin dynasty, possibly made from whale fat, and the Romans dipped them in both tallow and beeswax. Oil lamps were more common, though, because beeswax was dear.
By the Middle Ages candle making was a guild craft. A French guild is documented in 1061, and tallow candles first turn up in English writing in 1154. Tallow was cheap and close at hand, rendered from beef, pork or mutton suet. The poorest households used “tallow dips,” sometimes called farthing or penny dips for what they cost.
Even cheaper was the rushlight, and it’s our favorite object in this whole story. You gathered soft rush in summer, peeled away the green skin to leave the white pith (with one thin strip of rind left on as a spine), dried it, and dragged it through household fat, often bacon grease. In 1789 the naturalist Gilbert White measured one 28.5 inches long that burned for 57 minutes and judged that “these rushes give a good clear light.” Rushlights hung on in rural England until the end of the 19th century. Free light from a ditch and a frying pan!
Why beeswax was worth it
Beeswax is expensive for a reason you can see in the hive. Worker bees secrete it from eight small glands on the underside of the abdomen, in flakes so thin it takes about 1,100 of them to make a gram. Bees need something like 6.7 to 8.8 kilograms of honey to produce a single kilogram of wax. Every beeswax candle is a lot of flying!
What you got for it was a harder candle that burned cleaner, stayed upright instead of bending, and smelled faintly of honey. It melts at about 62 to 64 degrees Celsius. The Roman Catholic liturgy still recommends it for altar candles, and the Paschal candle lit at Easter is traditionally beeswax.
The Wax Chandlers received their royal charter from Richard III in 1484. These days, nicely, the two old rival trades celebrate Candlemas together each February.
Whales, chemists and paraffin
Then came a run of inventions that made candles cheap, bright and boring. First, whalers harvested spermaceti from the heads of sperm whales, and its candles burned so steadily that “candlepower,” a unit of light, was based on a pure spermaceti candle.
In the 1820s French chemists rebuilt the candle from the inside. Michel Eugène Chevreul and Joseph Gay-Lussac separated stearin from animal fat in 1823 and patented harder, brighter candles in 1825. That same year Cambacérès introduced the plaited wick, which trimmed itself as it burned. In 1834 Joseph Morgan patented a machine that made about 1,500 candles an hour.
Paraffin finished the job. The German chemist Carl Reichenbach first isolated it in 1830, and in the mid-1850s James Young was distilling it from coal and oil shale, giving the world cheap, clean-burning white candles. By the late 19th century, most candles were paraffin and stearic acid. And then, in 1879, the light bulb made the whole industry decorative.
Soy, tallow again, and the small-batch revival
Which brings us to now, when people make candles for the pleasure of it. The material most of them reach for is soy wax, a newcomer that took off in the 1990s as a cheaper, plant-based alternative to beeswax. It’s made by fully hydrogenating soybean oil, which turns the liquid oil into a soft, off-white solid. Soy is softer than paraffin and melts at a lower temperature, so it lives mostly in jars and tins, and it carries scent a little less strongly.
Is it the sustainable answer? Partly. It’s plant-based and biodegrades more easily than paraffin, and it’s renewable in a way petroleum isn’t. But it’s still an industrial crop product, hydrogenated in a factory. Beeswax is a byproduct of honey but scarce. And tallow, the cheapest light of the Middle Ages, is still just rendered fat. Every wax has a trade-off. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
The details that matter are the old ones. A wick sized to its wax. A container that can be reused (glass is easy to wash out and refill). And lead-core wicks, thankfully, have been uncommon since the 1970s.
For candles as objects of design, see House of Today’s candles presented as fine art or the Japanese lantern candle that changes its light as it burns down. And for the bees behind the beeswax, watch these Himalayan honey bees defending their nest in synchronized waves.
