Reading a candle recipe: what every section means
A tour of a candle recipe page — vessel, wax, fragrance load, wick lifecycle, temps, and batch history — so every section makes sense.
Open any candle recipe and there's a lot on the page. Here's what each part is telling you, top to bottom.
The header
At the very top is the status pill, the candle format, and the recipe name. The status pill is tap-to-cycle, not a dropdown — tap it to move the recipe along its lifecycle. Advancing a recipe all the way to retired is owner-only and asks you to confirm first, since it pulls the recipe out of your active list.
Next to the name you'll see a small lifecycle rail showing where the recipe sits, and — when the fragrance has a scent family on file — a scent glyph leading the name. If you have edit access, the name itself is editable in place.
Under the header sit the main actions: Start Production Batch, Start Test Batch, Take to Bench (which downloads a workbench PDF), and, for owners, Delete. Below that is the saved prompt Ellie built the recipe from, always shown, with Remix and Ask Ellie to Check for iterating.
Heads up: a status of validated means this one's proven — a wick has passed a burn test and been locked in.
At a glance
The first section, At a glance, is two cards side by side.
The Form card names your vessel — the jar, tin, or tumbler this recipe pours into — along with its inner diameter and fill capacity. Right beside it, the card shows the batch weight: the total wax-plus-fragrance for the pour and the per-candle amount when the batch makes more than one. If no vessel is bound yet, or the wax has no density on file, the weight reads as a gentle placeholder instead of a number — that's Ellie telling you what's still needed to size the pour.
The Specs · Candle card holds the numbers that define the candle:
| Spec | What it means |
|---|---|
| Wax | The wax this recipe is built on, with its brand. |
| Fragrance load | The fragrance percentage of wax weight, with the poured weight and how many oils it's spread across. |
| Pour temp | The temperature you pour at — with the safe add fragrance at temperature underneath. |
| Cure | The target cure time before the candle is ready to burn. |
| Flash point | The lowest flash point in the fragrance blend — the point Ellie keeps your pour temp below. |
If the pour temperature meets or exceeds the flash point, or the flash point is unknown, the Flash point spec carries a safety note right there in the card. That check is generated from your real numbers, never guessed — see Your candle fragrances for why flash point matters.
If you can edit the recipe, each card has a quick Swap vessel and Swap wax control so you can spin off a variant without starting over.
The wick lifecycle
Every candle recipe has a Wick lifecycle card, and it always shows — even on a fresh draft. It's split into two:
- Recommended — an advisory wick sized from your vessel diameter and wax family. It's a starting point ("advisory · before testing"), not a promise.
- Active — the wick you've actually confirmed. It stays a muted placeholder ("set after a burn test passes") until a burn test locks one in, then fills with the real wick and brand.
That two-step split is the whole point of candle making: the recommendation gets you into the first test, and the active wick is what testing proves. See Choosing and testing wicks for how the two connect.
What's in the pour
The Pours section lists the actual composition — one pour for a candle, broken into line items: the wax with its share of the batch, each fragrance oil in the blend with its percentage, and a colorant line if the candle is tinted. Each line shows the weight and flags anything that's low or out of stock on your shelf.
If the candle uses a colorant that isn't a candle dye, a safety callout appears above this section — a wax-unsafe colorant clogs the wick, so verify it before you pour. Editors get a Swap fragrance control here; swapping away from a multi-oil blend collapses it to the single picked oil, so Ellie warns you first.
Steps and notes
When the recipe has written steps, a Steps — in Ellie's words section walks the pour in order. Below that, Notes is a free space you can edit inline — throw, timing tweaks, lessons learned.
Batches
The Batches section at the bottom is your production history — every time you've actually run this recipe. Each row shows the lot code (or "No lot yet" while a run is still in progress), the production date, and a status pill: In progress, Abandoned, Curing, or Ready. Tap a row to open that run.
A batch starts here when you tap Start Production Batch or Start Test Batch at the top of the page. From there Ellie tracks the lot, the cure window, and the pour conditions — see Running a candle batch and Curing your candles.
This cannot be undone. Deleting a candle recipe also removes all of its production batch records and burn-test history along with it.