The History of Candles and Beeswax: From Illumination to Art

During the Christmas season of 1848, Michael Faraday stepped onto the stage at the Royal Institution in London. He held up an unlit candle, touched a flame to its wick, and turned to the audience with a question: “What is inside this flame?” The lecture was later published under the title The Chemical History of a Candle, and it remains a classic of popular science to this day.^[1]

Yet the candle Faraday held up carried a history far older than any chemical reaction. A candle was never merely a source of light. It was an object that divided the classes, a medium for religious ritual, and a commodity that underpinned entire economic systems. And beeswax — the core material of the finest candles — served humanity for thousands of years not only as a source of light but as a medium for sculpting, sealing, casting metal, and dyeing cloth.

The First Artificial Light: Oil Lamps and Rush Lights

Before candles, the oldest form of artificial lighting that humanity relied upon was the oil lamp. At Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating back roughly 100,000 years, archaeologists have found evidence of shells used as vessels for animal fat, fitted with plant-fiber wicks.^[2] Oil lamps were the most universal means of lighting throughout human history: Mediterranean peoples burned olive oil for thousands of years, Asians used sesame or soybean oil, and Arctic peoples used seal fat.

Meanwhile, the ancient Romans used a device called a rush light — a strip of reed or fibrous plant stem soaked in animal fat and hardened.^[3] It was neither an oil lamp nor a true candle with a wick, but something in between. Rush lights burned out quickly and produced smoke and foul odor, yet they remained in common use among ordinary people for centuries because the materials were easy to obtain.

In the Andean regions of present-day Ecuador and Peru, people fashioned torches from the candleilla plant, which secretes abundant resinous sap. In East Asia, the waxy coating of sumac berries was hardened and used for illumination; Japan used plant-based candles made by this method for a long period.^[4] In short, candles were not invented by any single civilization but developed independently across the world wherever suitable materials could be found.

Tallow Candles and Beeswax Candles: Class Divided by Smell

In medieval European society, candles fell clearly into two kinds: tallow candles and beeswax candles.

Tallow candles were made from the rendered fat found around the internal organs of cattle and sheep.^[5] Cheap and easy to source, they were widely used in common households — but they burned with a foul odor and thick black smoke. Lighting several tallow candles indoors left soot on the walls and fouled the air. The difference between the two materials was so pronounced that the London candle-making trade maintained separate guilds for tallow chandlers and wax chandlers.^[5]

Beeswax candles were made from the wax that honeybees secrete to build their hives. With a higher melting point than tallow, they burned longer and gave off a faint, sweet fragrance. Above all, they produced almost no smoke. They were, of course, expensive. In medieval Europe, beeswax candles were a luxury available only to royalty, the nobility, and the Church.^[6]

The Church’s demand for beeswax candles was enormous. Catholic liturgy required candles to be lit at virtually every ceremony — mass, funerals, baptisms. The twelfth-century monk Theophilus Presbyter left detailed written instructions for making beeswax candles, revealing that monasteries operated their own beekeeping and candle-making enterprises.^[6] Beeswax prices in medieval Europe were tracked as a key economic indicator alongside grain prices.^[7]

The Medieval Beeswax Economy: A Market Driven by the Church

In medieval Europe, beeswax was not merely a candle-making material but a commodity that structured an entire economic system. Wild-hive beeswax harvested from the forests of Eastern and Northern Europe traveled through commercial cities such as Flanders (in what is now northern Belgium) and Hamburg to be sold across the continent.^[7]

Beeswax was among the key trading goods of the Hanseatic League. Beeswax exported from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia in particular supplied the needs of Western European churches and courts.^[7] The beeswax trade was conducted not only as straightforward commodity exchange but also in the form of taxes and tribute. On some medieval estates, peasants were required to pay their rent in beeswax, and beeswax was sometimes included in the tithe paid to the Church.^[6]

At the heart of this beeswax economy stood the monastery. Monasteries ran large apiaries, producing honey and wax together. Honey served as a food and a medicine; wax fed the candle-making and trade. The income derived from beeswax was substantial within the monastic economy and helped fund construction, manuscript production, and charitable works.

Beeswax Beyond the Candle: Seals, Casting, and Art

The roles that beeswax played outside the world of lighting were remarkably diverse.

Sealing: The origin of sealing wax — used throughout the medieval and early modern periods to close letters and documents — lies in beeswax. Molten wax was dripped onto the folded edge of a letter, and a signet ring was pressed into it to leave the sender’s mark. This seal served as proof that the letter had not been opened in transit.^[8] Later formulations blended in red resin (shellac) to produce harder, sharper impressions, but beeswax was the original material.

Lost-wax casting: The technique known as lost-wax casting — used to create metal sculptures and castings — is one of the oldest methods of metal-forming in human history. The desired shape is first carved in wax; clay is then built up around it to form a mold; when heated, the wax melts and runs out. Molten metal poured into the empty space produces a metal object that is an exact copy of the wax original.^[9] Evidence of this technique has been found in copper objects from Shahdad in southern Iran dating to around 3700 BCE, and it developed independently in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, West Africa, and the Americas.^[9]

Wax figures: The practice of making human likenesses in wax appears in the religious rituals of ancient Egypt and Rome, but the most celebrated modern example is Marie Grosholtz, later known as Madame Tussaud. During and immediately before the French Revolution, she made death masks of executed aristocrats and modeled their wax heads.^[10] In 1802 she traveled to Britain and began a touring exhibition; in 1835 she opened a permanent gallery on Baker Street in London. The Madame Tussauds museums that now operate in major cities around the world are her direct descendants.

Batik dyeing: In the traditional textile dyeing of Indonesia and Malaysia known as batik, beeswax plays a central role. Molten wax is drawn onto fabric in patterns; when the fabric is dyed, the wax-covered areas resist the dye. Once the wax is removed after dyeing, the pattern drawn in wax remains on the cloth.^[11] Similar resist-dyeing traces have been found on the cloth wrappings of Egyptian mummies dating to the fourth century BCE. UNESCO inscribed Indonesian batik as an Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009.

Cosmetics and medicine: Beeswax has been used since antiquity as a base ingredient in ointments and creams for its skin-softening properties. The first-century Greek physician Dioscorides recorded the use of beeswax in wound treatment and the preparation of ointments.^[12] Today beeswax remains a raw material in countless cosmetic products, including lip balms, mascara, and moisturizing creams.

The Age of Spermaceti: Light from the Whale

In the eighteenth century, a powerful rival to beeswax candles appeared: spermaceti, a substance extracted from a specialized organ in the head of the sperm whale. In the living whale this material is liquid, but on exposure to air it solidifies into a white, crystalline mass.^[13]

Spermaceti candles burned brighter and more evenly than beeswax candles, and with less odor. Their light was so consistent and bright that spermaceti candles were adopted as the standard light source for measuring the unit of luminous intensity then called candlepower.^[13] The ports of Nantucket and New Bedford in New England grew into the centers of the sperm whale fishery, and the spermaceti candle industry was the engine of their regional economy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.^[14]

Spermaceti candles, however, carried a fatal structural weakness: their supply depended entirely on the whaling industry. When sperm whale catches declined or voyages failed, prices spiked. From the 1820s onward, as sperm whale populations began to fall, the pressure to find substitute materials intensified.^[14]

Chemistry Transforms the Candle: Stearin and Paraffin

In the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution and advances in chemistry fundamentally changed the history of the candle.

The first innovation was stearin. In 1818, the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul analyzed the chemical structure of fats and demonstrated that they are composed of fatty acids bonded to glycerol.^[15] Building on this research, Chevreul and his colleague Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac obtained a patent for stearin candles in 1825. By removing impurities from animal fat and isolating only the solid fatty acids (stearic acid), they produced a candle that burned far more cleanly, was harder, and lasted longer than tallow candles.^[15] Stearin candles began to spread widely through European markets from the 1830s onward.

The second innovation was paraffin. In the 1830s, the German chemist Carl von Reichenbach first isolated paraffin from the byproducts of coal distillation.^[16] Then in 1850, the Scottish chemist James Young invented and patented a method for producing paraffin oil in large quantities by distilling coal and oil shale.^[16] Refined paraffin wax was odorless, made from abundant raw materials, and above all cheap. Paraffin candles were less expensive than tallow candles, spermaceti candles, and even stearin candles, and they rapidly captured the mass market.

The combination of these two innovations brought about the democratization of the candle. By the late nineteenth century, paraffin candles had become an everyday commodity available everywhere in the world.

What Faraday Saw in a Candle

Faraday’s lectures of 1848 and 1860 were more than popular science education. From the single act of a candle burning, he drew out the core principles of both chemistry and physics: capillary action, combustion, oxidation, convection, and the nature of elements.^[1]

The way a wick draws up melted wax was a demonstration of capillary action. The rising of heated air around the flame and the descent of cooler air below it was an example of convection. The fact that burning wax produces water and carbon dioxide was, to audiences of the time, genuinely surprising. Faraday showed his listeners that “the most beautiful flame visible to the naked eye is in truth the product of a chemical reaction.”^[1]

The lectures subsequently became a model for science education directed at young people. The Christmas Lectures tradition at the Royal Institution was established by Faraday, and it continues to this day every year.^[17]

The Lightbulb and the Decline of the Candle

In 1879, Thomas Edison invented a commercially viable incandescent light bulb. As electrical grids expanded across cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, candles rapidly lost their status as a lighting device.^[18]

This transition happened in stages. Candle consumption fell first in urban areas where electricity arrived earliest; in rural regions and places where electrification was slow, candles remained essential. But by the mid-twentieth century, in most developed countries, candles had ceased to be objects of illumination. They survived mainly as emergency backup lights for power outages.^[18]

What is striking is that, even as candles lost their function as lighting, the candle-making industry did not disappear. Demand for candles in church ritual, memorial services, and ceremonial contexts remained steady. In religious contexts, candles were used for their symbolism rather than their function. The lightbulb replaced the candle’s light, but no lightbulb could replace the ritual meaning of an open flame.

The Return of the Scented Candle: For the Senses, Not the Light

In the latter part of the twentieth century, candles made an unexpected comeback — redefined not as a source of light but as a home décor item and fragrance product.

From the 1980s and 1990s, the scented candle market grew rapidly, primarily in the United States and Western Europe. Candles made from soy wax (a plant-based wax made from solidified soybean oil) or coconut wax appeared in a wide range of fragrances, and premium scented candle brands emerged.^[19] This was not a passing fad. People were no longer seeking light from candles; they were seeking atmosphere, scent, and a slower pace of time.

After 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic — which kept people at home for extended periods — drove another surge in the scented candle market. By the early 2020s, the global candle market had grown to a scale of tens of billions of dollars, with scented and decorative candles accounting for a significant share.^[19]

Beeswax is also receiving renewed attention. As it became known that paraffin candles release fine soot particles when burned, more consumers have come to prefer natural beeswax candles.^[20] A return to the bees — just as people did thousands of years ago.

What the Flame Left Behind

Just as Faraday found the principles of the universe in a single candle, the history of the candle shows how many layers a single material can carry. It is a story of class and smell, of church economics, of whales and chemists.

Beeswax created light and, in the hands of bronze-casters, took on form. It sealed a diplomat’s letter and drew patterns on a weaver’s cloth. It shaped the portrait heads of Madame Tussaud, and today it is an ingredient in your lip balm.

That this material survived across thousands of years — never discarded, always finding new uses — is perhaps due to a single quality that beeswax possesses. Warmed gently, it softens and yields; cooled, it hardens once more. It accepts any shape and holds that shape for a long time. It is hard to imagine a material better suited to carrying whatever it is that human beings most desire.