How to use the SUN to bleach candle wax.

Happy Friday candle friends!  Are you tired of me complaining about the heat?.... even I"m tired of me complaining about the heat..so I decided it was the perfect time for a positive ball of fire post, aka the sun.

Did you know that you can bleach your candle wax using the awesome rays from that big ole burning orb up in the sky?  And it's totally easy too and by golly we sure have a whole lot of sun here in the south west.   I've been putting it to good use.

Quick note; my wax formula is pretty simple, it's a plain ole food grade paraffin with additives, epolene or vybar to make the wax opaque and UV inhibitor to help the color not fade.  I know what your thinking, but don't worry the direct sun ignores UV inhibitor completely.

All you need is a metal baking pan, I use an old cookie sheet with sides, some wax, I use scrap wax and lots and lots of sunshine!  

Step 1.  Melt your scrap and pour a thin layer in to your metal pan.  An 1/8 inch is ideal.  The thinner your layer the quicker the sun can work its magic and bleach out that color.

Step 2.  Choose an area outside with lots of direct sunlight.

Step 2. Wait.

Step 3.  Binge watch something on netflix or prime.  The first season of The Expanse was amazing!

Step 5. Wait until the sun has removed all the color.

This pan had been sitting in the sun for several days, the pan in the top right corner was in direct sunlight for over  5 days, it looks white in the photo but still had a light pinkish hue.   It took close to a month to become fully bleached in April.

It could take a few days to a few weeks.  When I did this in April, I set out 6 pans and it took close to a month to fully remove all the color.  (my scrap consists of a rainbow of colors all melted down) We also had a bit of rain that month and I had to sprint outside to retrieve my pans.

The last week of June, however was much quicker. It took only three days for a pan of reddish wax to bleach out to a pale translucent-ish/white.

If you have plexiglas or plates of glass to put over your pans that could be very helpful in keeping out dust and other debris that blows around outdoors.   I don't have any of that and my pans do accumulate debris from my yard.  I have to filter the wax afterwords.

Sadly I don't have a lot of images to share of the process. it was after the fact that I thought it would make a nice blog post, but I promise the next batch I bleach I'll document it better and update it here.

Have a great weekend and wonderful 4th of July. :)