The 7 Best Online Candle-Making Classes of 2023

Photo comp of candle making materials — Spruce Crafts / Design by Amelia Manley

Our Top Picks

Makesy: Best Overall
Makers Mess Introduction to Candle Making: Best for Beginners
Paddywax Candle Bar Candle Making at Home: Best for Groups
Torera George: Best for Scented Candles
Francois et Moi: Best for Beeswax Taper Candles
CandleScience: Best for Blending Fragrance Oils
Sheri Vegas: Best for Adding Colors to Your Candles

There’s no better time like the present to cozy up and try your hand at mastering the art of candle-making. Candles add warmth, scent, and ambiance to your home, and whether you’re looking to save money on purchasing candles, want to go hands-on with a new side hobby, or are in need of unique gift ideas for your family and friends, you can get a whiff of what candle-making is all about with online courses.

We’ve put together a list of the best online candle-making classes that you can learn how to make them at home, whenever you’re free. So if you’d like to nail down the basics, perfect your candle’s scent throw, experiment with fragrance and color, start your own candle-making business, or simply have a new bonding experience with your family, friends, or coworkers, we have a lineup of workshops and classes to get you inspired.

If you’re looking for a variety of class options, The Wooden Wick Co. has you covered.

The self-described “community and online marketplace, designed for the Mindful Maker of today” offers high-quality, consciously sourced supplies for at-home crafts and the body. Its YouTube channel has a wealth of free, DIY tutorials across disciplines. Plus, the curated Candle-Making playlist dives deep into anything and everything you would want to know about making your own candles.

You can start with straightforward how-tos like Candle Wax! How to Choose the Right Type, The 10 Candle Making Terms You Should Know, or the easy-to-execute How To Make a Multi-Wick Candle. If you have more expertise, get a crash course in the nuances of perfecting your candles with videos on sinkholes, jump lines, the right wick size, and creating paraffin, beeswax, shimmery mica candles, and more.

There’s even a tutorial on how to properly burn a candle. If candle-making is moving beyond just a hobby for you, the five-part series on building your own candle business might be right up your alley.

Makers Mess Introduction to Candle Making

Makers Mess is a creative art studio based in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Not only does it offer art and design classes for kids and adults, but it has also expanded the studio’s offering to workshops online.

With its Intro to Candle Making class, you will learn the ins and outs of poured candle-making, creating your own clean-burning candles incorporating cotton wicks and natural fragrances for about $20. The workshop is prerecorded, so you can complete it at your own pace. Once you purchase the class, you’ll receive a download with a link to the course video, plus instructional information with tips, tricks, and ideas for your next candle project.

If you don’t have any candle-making supplies, you can purchase a kit on the Makers Mess site to get started. You can also set up the class as your own virtual private event with a live Zoom workshop that’s perfect for birthday parties, a team bonding experience, or a special night in. With a minimum of eight participants, the price is roughly $35 per person, plus the price of the candle-making kit.

Paddywax Candle Bar Candle Making at Home

With locations in Nashville, Charlotte, Birmingham, Reston, and Philadelphia, Paddywax Candle Bar is a place for friends to come together over drinks and connect while creating custom candles. The company has taken its IRL workshops to the virtual world, so friends and family can get together in a safe, socially distanced manner.

No matter if it’s a friend, family, or work event, Paddywax’s kits will set you up to pour your own artisan candle, complete with beautiful custom vessels and a lineup of the company's signature fragrances. You can choose from keeping your workshop within your own group or having a 30-minute virtual question and answer session with a Paddywax professional candle maker.

Depending on your level of candle-making expertise, you can choose to outfit your kit with tools (or not). Pricing for candle-making workshops with tools ranges from $38 to $45 per kit and $23 to $30 for kits with no tools (depending on the number of people involved).

Take your pick of ceramic or metal vessels in a variety of designs and scents that hit the notes of spice, woody, sweet, fresh, and seasonal, including amber and smoke, fresh Meyer lemon, wild fig and cedar, pumpkin latte, and more.

Scent is key to creating the ultimate candle for your home. Are you familiar with the term “throw?” In short, it’s the strength of the fragrance of your candle—how the wax smells solid (“cold throw”) and when the candle is lit (“hot throw”).

Torera George, whose YouTube channel features free, DIY tutorials and self-care tips, breaks down How to Make Candles That Actually Smell Good. In other words, a candle with good scent throw. George outlines a simple list of ingredients you’ll need, and in this video, she uses soy wax, wicks, a glass (as a vessel for the candle), a kitchen scale, a candle thermometer (an absolute necessity), and—most importantly—essential oil for the fragrance.

In this video, George uses lemongrass oil. She walks you through step-by-step of attaching the wick to your vessel and melting the wax—and most importantly, the ideal amount of essential oil and the optimal temperature needed in order to add your oil into the wax for the best scent throw. This is what truly distinguishes a well-scented candle from other DIY candles.

Looking for a truly simple way to bring the beauty of beeswax candles into your home? Erin Francois of Francois et Moi has the ultimate hack. In this quick and free video, she shows you how to create taper candles for your dining room table or wherever you please.

Starting with 8-by-16-inch sheets of beeswax, a medium-braided wick, scissors, and a ruler, she cuts the sheets into two smaller pieces and then cuts and places a wick that extends a half of an inch beyond the sheet. Then, she starts to roll the edge of the beeswax sheet around the wick, continuously rolling the sheet.

The key is to keep the wax tight around itself until the roll is complete. (Though, if you prefer a skinnier candle, you can stop rolling halfway through the sheet of beeswax.) The stickiness of the beeswax will hold the form together. Then, your candles will be ready to be placed in your candlesticks.

CandleScience’s offering of affordably priced candle-making supplies is designed for the at-home candle hobbyist and small business owner, and the company is an authority on all things related to making candles.

While its YouTube channel spotlights many free, informational videos, for those candle makers ready to experiment with scent, check out its special installment of CandleScience Live: How To Blend Fragrance Oils. In this almost-hour long video, Cassi and Kevin from CandleScience offer a session on the subject of blending fragrance oils, demonstrating scent-blending and addressing how to mix fragrance oils, how many fragrance oils to mix together, scent pairings, and more.

The duo also covers potential opportunities for scent-blending, like the fact that scent blends can give your candles a whiff of exclusivity. Or, how you can specifically highlight a note within a fragrance oil. Scent-blending can also help you refine your nose and practice picking out notes in fragrances, spanning top, middle, and base notes.

Once you’ve mastered the basics of candle-making, take your skills up a notch with this colorful tutorial from Sheri Vegas. Here, Sheri demonstrates three different ways to add DIY color to your candles.

The supplies you need include wax, wicks, and vessels, any fragrance or essential oil you’d like to add, and of course, your burning-safe dyes. For this tutorial, Vegas experiments with one colored dye method per candle: cosmetic-grade mica shimmer powder, food coloring, and proper candle dye. Once the wax is melted, you’re ready to start with your dyeing.

Using the candle dye is easy: Just add a few drops, depending on your desired level of color intensity to the wax, and mix. Use the same technique to incorporate the food coloring and mica. Then, secure the wicks in your vessels, pour in the melted wax, and let them set. Watch for the results of Vegas’s method, like an ombre effect that’s created with the mica shimmer.

In order to choose the best online candle-making classes, we considered a variety of factors. Most important was selecting ones that would give a good foundation for beginner candle makers (like the Makers Mess introductory class), but also allowing more experienced makers to learn new tips and tricks (such as the courses from The Wooden Wick Co.).

Approachability was a key factor. All of the courses on this list were created by experienced candle makers or crafters who are able to communicate technique to those taking their lessons or tutorials online and following along at home. And, while there is a cost associated with some of them (such as the workshop at Paddywax Candle Bar and the course at Makers Mess), the others on this list are accessible for free on YouTube.

Online candle-making classes illuminate the art of making your own candles. They are ideal for people who are interested in crafting who want to learn how to pour their own wax, experiment with fragrances, and learn how to dye wax.

There’s no wrong time to take an online candle-making class. You can choose it as an individual or as a group activity, no matter the time or the season. But candles do come in handy as gifts around the holidays, so fall and winter could be a great time to start learning.

There’s a variety of price points for these classes. The cost of an online Makers Mess Introduction to Candle Making class is about $20, and a virtual group workshop with Paddywax Candle Bar ranges from roughly $23 to $45 per person, depending on the size of your workshop party and the number and type of kits you select. All other classes listed here are free and are available to stream on YouTube. However, there is the added cost of supplies for the candles you choose to make.