Essential oil is all natural, extracted directly from plants, flowers and fruits etc. If you are producing a candle specifically for use in aromatherapy you must use essential oils as only essential oil brings the benefits of aromatherapy. They are very expensive and may or may not put off much scent when used in a candle. Like all candle making, it takes some testing. Candle Soylutions does not carry essential oils but we do supply candle fragrance oils to a lot of candle makers who have given up on essential oils out of either frustration with wicking, quality control issues, a lack of scent throw and of course the cost of the essential oils makes the selling price of the candle very high.

Fragrance oil is manmade. This does not mean it is bad or unsafe. Many natural ingredients can be harmful, and many synthetic ingredients have a long and proven record of being perfectly safe. Most candles and bath and body products use fragrance oil. Products like shampoo, shower gel, hair conditioner, lotions, antiperspirants and many other products you already use on your body contain fragrance oil.

Fragrance Oil contains ingredients that make the scent you smell. Those ingredients may or may not be all natural, and may even contain essential oils. Those ingredients come in a "carrier oil" or base. That carrier oil can be either natural soybean oil (Soy Based) or a synthetic fragrance grade carrier oil (Synthetic Based).

The fragrance manufacturers do not disclose much information about their ingredients under the "proprietary formula" rules. Proprietary means they own the formula and don’t have to disclose the ingredients to make it harder for others to copy it. Most likely the synthetic carrier is fragrance grade DPG or DPGF. The Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) are not much help because they only disclose ingredients in sufficient quantity to be considered "Hazardous" or toxic, so most don't offer any valuable info at all. I guess that is good, though.

The Soy Based fragrances would be considered more natural than the Synthetic Based Fragrances but each can contain ingredients that are not natural and when you make a candle you may add dye that is not 100% natural. This is why we always suggest you be careful in your marketing of candles. It may be better to state “made with all natural soy wax” than “100% natural”, the latter limits your choices and your market to a very small niche.

Are Synthetic or Soy Based Fragrances Stronger, and why do so many opinions differ on what is “Strong”?   Whether you consider a fragrance to be stronger or not will depend on your nose, the individual scent, and your candle making process more than the carrier oil that it’s in. Different people are sensitive to different scents. If you are less sensitive to certain scents, they will be less strong to you. The synthetic based fragrances are not always the stronger ones. We have numerous fragrances in soy base that are very strong, like our Vanilla, Pumpkin Pie, Baby Powder, Lavender, Hazelnut and Hazelnut Coffee, Cinnamon, Red Hot Cinnamon, Pecan Pie… all come to mind but there are many more. There are also scents that always seem to be mild, regardless which carrier oil they are in, like the melons and many herbal scents.

You can buy fragrance oil known to be really strong and get poor scent throw from your candle. How you make your candle has a great impact on scent throw. Always bring your soy wax to the manufacturers recommended temperature BEFORE adding your fragrance oil. This assures the oil mixes with the wax on a molecular level. For example our Enchanted Lites soy container waxes will melt around 125-127 degrees but you must bring it up to 175-180 degrees before adding the fragrance. Also, pouring your candles too hot will impact the scent. Our recommended pour temperature is 95-110 degrees for container wax. Pouring container wax around 130 degrees can "lock in" much of the hot throw scent. Be patient and let your candle cure for about 4 days before burning to check the hot throw. There is more information on How to Make Soy Candles under Helpful Info/Instructions, at the top of any page.
This is part of the reason why there are so many opinions in the market about what scent is strong and not strong.

Many of our fragrance oils are skin safe for use in personal care products like soap, creams, lotions, etc. "Not Skin Safe" means just use it for candles and incense only.
We have Fragrance Oils in both Synthetic Based, and Soy Based that are Skin Safe. The carrier oil does not determine if it’s skin safe...it's the ingredients that create the scent you smell.

California Propositin 65. All our Fragrance Oils meet CA Prop 65 standards. If you are adding them to bath and body products, just make sure you purchase Skin Safe fragrance oils. To the best of our knowledge, none of our fragrance manufactures test on animals.

Nitro Musks. Nitro Musks are one type of man-made substitute for the real musk oil which can only be taken from the small Asian Musk Deer, Tokapi Deer or Chinese Wild Deer which is an endangered species that originates deep in the Himalayan mountains and whose extract is worth it's weight in gold, which is why they are still poached to this day. Nitro musks are innexpensive to make and found as additives in many cleaning agents, detergents, soaps and other odor improving cosmetics. To our knowledge none of our manufactures use Nitro Musks in our fragrances.

Phthalates. Our fragrances comply with the International Fragrance Associations' safety and purity standards (www.ifraorg.org) and all applicable international, federal, state, and local regulations. Some of the fragrance compounds our manufacturers use contain Phthalates. The Phthalates that are used in our fragrance compounds have established a strong safety profile over the last 50 years in which they have been in use. There are different types of Phthalates. The EU Cosmetics Directive restricts the use in cosmetics products of chemicals that are classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic to reproduction and the Phthalates that are in our fragrance compounds are not on the restricted list.

Phthalate has been used in fragrances for years. It is a good raw material and can be used across many different fragrance applications and forms. Phthalates is a broad term to describe a large class of compounds of different chemical structures... some of which have been found to be not safe to use in consumer products. These compounds have been tagged as unsafe and are currently being removed from customer products. Our fragrances do not use any of these materials. The one phthalate that our manufactures are still using is safe and has been tested extensively with results published in peer reviewed journals. However, because it is a phthalate, it has been grouped with the others...guilty by association. A great example of using this type of broad generalization is mushrooms. Some mushrooms are deadly or unsafe to eat yet other mushrooms are very good and safe to eat.

As such, we believe that it is important for us and our fragrance manufactures to follow the recommendations of IFRA (International Fragrance Association) and RIFM (Research Institute of Fragrance Materials). Our Fragrance Suppliers are members of IFRA/RIFM, and take seriously our responsibility as a Home Fragrance/consumer product seller to follow IFRA/RIFM safety guidelines.

Chemical Concerns. I recommend anyone that has concerns about chemicals to visit www.scorecard.org You can type in a compound name and get all kinds of interesting and sometimes scary information about it. Type in "water". It is listed as a "Suspected" Gastrointestinal or Liver Toxicant and Neurotoxicant. I don’t mean to make light of your concerns, I only use this example to temper your concern because there is a lot of information out there and it is not all helpful or even realistic. I still drink water and suspect that you do too.

ALL OF OUR FRAGRANCE OILS ARE SOLD UN-CUT, UNDILUTED, EXACTLY HOW THEY CAME TO US FROM THE MANUFACTURER. They are all packaged BY WEIGHT (on a scale), not by liquid volume! That is why you see sizes like 1/2 lb or 1 lb instead of 8 oz or 16 oz. Different scents will have a different specific gravity. So, you may get a bottle of heavier fragrances that the bottle is just 3/4 full (especially Vanilla), and you may receive some of the citrus fragrances and the bottle is filled all of the way to the top because they tend to be lighter weight (more volume), but on the scale, a pound is a pound regardless of what level the fragrance comes to.

Fragrance Oil Returns: The only way you can be assured of receiving uncut, unadulterated fragrance oils from us is if we don't accept them in return. So fragrance oils are not returnable, not for any reason, so we suggest you buy small sizes to try them out before you buy in large quantities at wholesale prices. Remember also, just because you don't care for a scent doesn't mean others won't like it. So if you're making candles to sell, try lots of different scents in different categories to give people several choices, even if they're not all your favorites. Please visit our Policies page for more info.