Richness of experience
Good craftsmanship is a prime requirement throughout the process of manufacturing our candles. Making a quality candle means first and foremost trusting your people, their skill, their delicate, patiently repeated gestures, inherited from a unique and rare ancestral art.
In “craft” manufacture, every object a person makes carries a part of their humanity in it, which is why each of our candles carries within it a part of our heart.
Moulding
First, the master workpiece – a unique piece sculpted on the premises by our style and creation teams – has to be approved. This is used as the pattern for creating silicone moulds. Pilot production runs are then made to finalise the details (appearance, finish and combustion testing).
The adventure may then continue with the use of mass-production moulds that are hand-filled with liquid paraffin at about 75°. Everything is then left to cool, and as soon as possible each candle is extracted from its mould. Depending on the model, it may be left with its unfinished appearance or may be worked on to obtain its final look. The last phase of the process is known as “surface treatment” when we can apply a multitude of finishes (patina, paint, varnish, glitter or engraving).
Throughout this type of manufacture, each operation is done by hand. That is the guarantee that each product is outstandingly made with a production process of the craftsman type.
On none of our figurative candles have machinery and progress been able to supplant the human hand!
Machine casting
This type of manufacture, using machines known as “casting frames” is applied to the manufacture of classic “table centre” candles and also for the famous perforated candles.
The raw material used, again in liquid form, is poured into a tray at the top. While still liquid, the paraffin fills a series of moulds one after the other as you might fill a tray of ice-cubes.
Solidification is accelerated by a cold-water circulation system. It takes at least 40/45 minutes to cool a batch of 400 to 500 candles. This process, without altering the material, produces candles of very high quality. Also, using this process and this type of machine, we can colour our candles all the way through (solution dyed). This great flexibility in the creation of colour effects, from gradations to multiple tones, means we can offer you a large colour range (32 colours).
Here again, our skill is illustrated by the temperature control throughout the manufacturing process, and the careful colour matching.
Pouring
According to the most ancient techniques, waxes or paraffins have always been used in liquid form. The exceptions are the more recent methods of extrusion and hydraulic compression.
So, the whole art of correct pouring lies in the choice of good materials and additives. To obtain the desired fluidity, we have to maintain the material at a temperature of about 75/80°. When using different liquid waxes, it was quite natural to adopt different pouring processes, in different types of containers (glass, ceramic, metal tins, etc.). We place a little candle like a tea-light or a taper in the middle of the container and pour the liquid paraffin of the same colour around it; this holds the wick central and gives the candle a little more soul, perhaps…
It is worth remembering that the containers are chosen specially to obtain more power of diffusion, which gives a better perfume quality.