What we don't pour, and why.

We do not pour paraffin. Paraffin is a petroleum byproduct, easy to work with, cheap, and stable. It also smells, faintly, of the refinery. We have never been able to un-notice it once we started looking.

We do not pour at 12% fragrance load. The industry standard is 6 to 10%. Higher loads burn dirtier and dull within a year. We sit at 9%.

We do not use the word natural. It means almost nothing — paraffin is natural in the sense that crude oil is natural. We use plant-based where it is true, and synthetic where it is true, and we trust you to read both.

A candle, like a sentence, is what it leaves out.

We do not use the word clean. We do not use the word toxin-free. We do not write artisanal on anything. There is a list, taped above the wax pot, of words we will not put on a label, and the list keeps growing.

What we do pour: soy and coconut wax, lead-free cotton wicks, mouth-blown glass, fragrance compositions written in Grasse, and sometimes — when a small thing matters — a single drop of essential oil that costs more than the whole candle. We will tell you which.