Don’t Cry Over Spilled Wax: A Stress-Free Approach to Candle Wax Removal

Pin It

This weekend we had a significant dinnertime wax spill. Our glass, tubular candleholder holds five tea lights, and it had gotten bumped amidst passing plates. Wax spilled into the cups holding the tea lights, over the rounded edge of the candleholder and onto the table. Not exactly a delight for the one who does the cleaning.

Luckily, I have been cleaning up wax spills since childhood (wax is just way too fun to play with). In one instance, my mom reluctantly allowed me to make candles. She must have had a premonition that I’d spill the melted wax, and sure enough, I spilled it on the kitchen floor. Instead of scraping it off, she had me place paper towels over the hardened wax and use a clothes iron to melt the wax, which was then soaked up by the paper towels.

I was planning to use that same technique to clean up the wax on our table, but was a little nervous the iron might be too hot for the tabletop. I decided instead to use my embossing heat tool or embossing gun, as I like to call it. This way I could have more control over heat and monitor whether the heat was doing any damage to the tabletop. Well, it worked wonders. Read on.

This is the candle holder. Note the wax spilled on the sides and inside the little cups. (And the tealight on the far left lost its wick in the hubbub)

 Here’s a close-up. We tried scraping off some of the wax near the bottom, but as you can see, it left unsightly wax remains. Time for a new approach.

The wonder tool: my embossing gun. It heated the wax quickly and didn’t blow wax particles around like a hairdryer, making it an ideal tool for wax cleanup.

The candle holder requires a light touch in cleaning. On a previous wax-removal venture I popped a hole into one of the tealight holder cups. Thankfully the embossing gun does a quick, effective job of melting the wax so all I have to do is gently wipe it out with paper towels and Q-tips rather than applying pressure by scraping the glass and risking further damage to the candle holder.

Et voila—the wax is gone with just 10 minutes of my attention. There are still fingerprints on the glass, but a little Windex should take care of that. Not only was the removal of wax stress free, but I discovered that my embossing gun isn’t a unitasker after all. I know it’s not good for people to multi-task, but hey, I’m not going to complain when it’s my tools doing the multi-tasking.