Beatrix Hollow

It is a stage and day four is the worst of it. Soy typically needs one to two weeks to cure and there is a well known slump in the first week where cold throw drops before it comes back. Lids on, somewhere stable, smell them again at day 10 and day 14.

One thing to check though: 82C is fine for adding fragrance but two minutes of stirring is on the short side. Stir gently for a full two minutes minimum, longer for thick oils, and scrape the sides. Poorly bound fragrance smells great early and then disappears.

If you log, log the postdrome separately from the pain. Two of my patterns only became visible once I counted those days as affected rather than as normal days.

Any trick for getting the last invisible film off, or is it just patience with a blade?

I did not fill it. I did not know that was a thing and now it seems obvious.

Keep a very simple log: wake time, first caffeine, and whether you got one. Three columns. After eight weeks the pattern is usually visible without any interpretation at all.

A bamboo skewer will not mark glass. Go nearly to the bottom and make four or five around the wick, not one.

Skewer holes need to go nearly to the bottom of the jar, not 1cm in. Shallow holes vent nothing.

Test with the fragrance you actually sell. Different oils behave completely differently at the same load - vanilla heavy ones are notorious for needing a size up over something citrus. A wick that is perfect in one scent tunnels in another.

You mostly live with it, but you can push it a long way down.

It is thermal contraction. The wax shrinks as it cools, glass does not, and adhesion fails wherever the bond is weakest. Warming the jars to about 40C before pouring and then cooling slowly - a cardboard box over the whole batch overnight - gets me around nine clean jars in ten. Pouring hotter does not help; pouring into a cold jar in a 20C room is the main culprit.

Also worth saying: wet spots are cosmetic only. They do not affect burn, throw or safety. Commercial soy candles have them too, they just get sold before anyone notices.

Oven on its lowest setting for ten minutes, then out onto a towel. A heat gun gives you uneven jar temperature, which just moves the problem around the glass.

Splitting it into three blocks of thirty minutes helped me more than any setting did. Same cards, far less drift after the twenty minute mark.

Buy 5kg of each first. A 25kg box of a wax that does not suit your fragrances is a very sad thing to own for a year.