So this often comes up when I see people talking about how their candles go fast. There tends to be a comment mentioning that it’s because of “burn memory” meaning that the FIRST time you light the candle, if it’s blown out too soon (before the melted wax reaches the edges of jar), then from there on it might not melt to the edges of the container ever again and will continue to tunnel downward every time you light it. I guess I know what they’re describing, but this makes zero sense to me. When you go to light it at a later time….how would the candle know and why not just continue melting outward 😩
Not trying to zoom through this weirdly expensive Boys Smell I was gifted recently
In: Chemistry
Burn memory is just a fancy way of saying make sure you burn your candle long enough to melt on all sides for every burn. No such thing as burn memory, don’t believe it.
If you do blow out the candle before the wax has fully melted, then it’s not evenly distributed. The next time you light the candle there will be too much wax on one side, which causes your wick/s to drown. This will cause the flame to go lower and lower, and less heat to the wax. That makes it tunnel.
You can easily fix this by soaking some of the wax up if you notice it is starting to tunnel. The safest way is to blow the candle out, use a cotton ball or rolled up paper towel, soak some wax out, and relight.
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People like to anthropomorphize things. Just because the term is ridiculous doesn’t mean the idea is not valid. Candle wax is fuel, that fuel cannot be used in solid form, it must be melted, and then the vapors are combusted. The heat from the combustion liquefies more candle wax. The wax is also a good insulator though, so if you heat it up, where you’ve made a pit, and don’t let that entire layer liquefy, it will be increasingly harder to spread the heat out, so the heat will increasingly concentrate toward the center. causing it to melt down, instead of out.
There’s no memory. To burn the wax it needs to evaporate, before that, it melts. When the candle is new, it has a long thread (sorry, English is not my native lang), it gives a big flame that melts the wax easily.
When you blow it, the thread is burned shorter and the flame is smaller and colder. You can’t melt as much wax and only that molten wax will burn.
Edit: wick! I forgot xD
The thing is that if you make a hole in the candle by not allowing it to melt to the border it makes it easier to keep making that hole deeper but not wider, you can somewhat mitigate this by using a lighter to “help” melting the wax
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