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I started Mikaya wanting to use only essential oils. No fragrance oil, no synthetic anything, just plant extracts in a candle. That was the plan for the first few months.
It is not what we do today, and I want to walk you through exactly why. This was not a marketing decision.
It came from six months of research, a lot of uncomfortable conversations, and a personal worry about my own health as the person who actually pours these candles.
Mikaya uses fragrance oil, not essential oil, because essential oils degrade and can become a fire risk under a candle's heat, and expose the person making the candle to hours of concentrated vapor.
We use IFRA compliant, phthalate free fragrance oil sourced directly from a certified manufacturer, and we are open that it is synthetic.
The candles that called themselves natural
Before I poured a single candle, I spent weeks talking to other home fragrance brands that marketed themselves as fully natural. I wanted to learn from people already doing what I thought I wanted to do.
So I asked them directly: what do you actually scent your candles with? Almost every answer was some version of the same thing. Fragrance oil, with a small percentage of essential oil blended in, sold to the customer as natural.
Nobody was lying outright, but nobody was being fully honest either. A candle that is mostly fragrance oil with a token amount of essential oil is not a natural candle. It is a fragrance oil candle with a marketing story attached to it.
Brand after brand used the word natural on the label and fragrance oil in the vat. When I pushed, the honest ones admitted it. That was the moment I stopped assuming natural candles were common at scale, and started asking whether they were even possible.
What the fragrance manufacturers told me
I went to the source next: the people who manufacture fragrance and essential oils for candle makers. I told them plainly that I wanted to go essential oil only, whatever it cost.
I was not trying to save money. I wanted to know if it could be done properly. The answer, from more than one manufacturer, was some version of no, and here is why.
Essential oils do not throw scent the way a candle needs
Scent throw is the real test of a candle, measured two ways: cold throw, how strongly the wax smells unlit, and hot throw, how well the fragrance fills a room once lit.
Fragrance oils are engineered specifically for this job. According to CandleScience, fragrance oils are built to be burned in a candle and hold their aroma's character through the burn, something essential oils were never designed to do, since candles are only one of many uses they serve.
Heat is the actual problem
This was the part that changed my mind completely. Essential oils generally have a much lower breakdown point than fragrance oil built for combustion, and many start degrading well before a candle reaches full burn temperature.
A candle that promises lavender can end up smelling like very little, or worse, like burnt lavender, halfway through its first burn.
Essential oils typically carry a lower flash point than candle-engineered fragrance oil. Push the concentration up to compensate for weak throw, and you push a more flammable material closer to an open flame.
That is a fire safety problem, not just a scent one, and you would not notice until something went wrong.
The health question nobody was asking me, so I asked it myself
Here is the part of this decision that had nothing to do with the customer. I make these candles. I have spent entire days blending, testing, and reworking a scent before it is ready to sell.
A customer burns a candle for a few hours in a ventilated room. I would be the one standing over an open vat of concentrated oil for far longer than that, week after week.
Essential oils are not automatically safe simply because they are natural. Anyone who works with them repeatedly, not just once, is the one who tends to run into trouble.
Anyone who works with essential oils is at higher risk of reaction and must stay vigilant about long-term exposure.
American College of Healthcare Sciences, on essential oil sensitization
Sensitization is different from a one-time irritation. It builds with repeated exposure, and it shows up specifically in the people who handle concentrated fragrance material for a living.
Clinical literature on aromatherapists, professionals who handle essential oils daily, points to hand eczema from allergic contact as the most common presentation. Dermatology researchers have identified more than eighty essential oils as known contact allergens.
I want to be honest about something here, because it would be easy to let this read as an essential oil problem alone. It is not. Fragrance oil is not automatically safer just because it is synthetic.
Any concentrated fragrance material, natural or synthetic, carries some sensitization risk with repeated, close handling. That is exactly why RIFM, the fragrance industry's own safety research body, sets maximum safe concentrations for known sensitizing ingredients, regardless of whether they originate from a plant or a lab.
What I actually get from a documented, IFRA compliant fragrance oil is confirmation it was formulated inside that safety margin. That protection comes from testing and disclosure, not from being synthetic, and it is not something I could get from essential oil bought without the same rigor.
There is a separate, less discussed air quality question too. Burning any fragrant compound releases some volatile organic compounds, natural or synthetic.
A widely cited 2016 study in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere and Health found that scented candles can release well over a hundred different VOCs during burning, some above recommended limits.
Essential oils are not automatically exempt from this simply because they came from a plant rather than a lab.
What I was not willing to compromise on, once I chose fragrance oil
Deciding on fragrance oil did not mean any fragrance oil would do. If anything, it opened up a new problem. There are a lot of fragrance oil sellers in India, and most of them are traders, not manufacturers.
They buy in bulk from somewhere, repackage it, and sell it on, often without a Certificate of Analysis or any IFRA documentation at all.
I could not verify what I could not see documentation for. A cheap, undocumented fragrance oil carries its own version of the same risk I was trying to avoid.
Unknown ingredients, unknown concentrations, unknown safety margins, in a product I would be handling in far larger quantities than any customer ever would.
Per the International Fragrance Association, a Certificate of Conformity confirms a fragrance mixture meets the safety requirements for its specific use, and even essential oils can fall under IFRA restrictions.
Without that certificate, there is no independent check on what is going into the wax, or into the room I am standing in while I make it.
It took a little over six months to find a fragrance oil manufacturer, not a trader, willing to work with a brand as small as Mikaya was at the time.
They compound their own fragrances, formulate them to be IFRA compliant, and issue a proper COA with every batch, while still filling orders at the volumes a small business actually places.
We source directly from them, not through a distributor, because that is the only way I can trace exactly what is in every scent we sell.
Where essential oils are genuinely the better choice
It would be dishonest to end this at essential oils are bad. They are not. They are excellent for topical aromatherapy, diffusing in short bursts, and applications where a lower, controlled dose matters more than a strong, sustained scent.
A candle asks an oil to survive an open flame for hours. That is a different job, and it favors a different material.
There is also a resource question worth sitting with, though I have not fully verified the figures myself. Some sources put the ratio at roughly ten thousand pounds of rose petals for a single pound of rose oil.
If that holds across the wider industry, scaling a candle brand entirely on essential oils raises real questions about land and water use that a lab-formulated fragrance oil does not carry in the same way.
| Factor | Essential oil | Fragrance oil (IFRA compliant) |
|---|---|---|
| Scent throw when burned | Often weak, degrades with heat | Engineered for consistent cold and hot throw |
| Heat stability | Lower flash point, can break down or combust | Formulated for candle burn temperatures |
| Documentation available | Rarely batch tested for candle use | COA and IFRA certificate per batch, from a real manufacturer |
| Repeated handling risk | Sensitization risk in regular handlers, rarely governed by candle-specific concentration limits | Same underlying risk, but usage is governed by IFRA concentration limits regardless of origin |
| Scent range | Limited to what a plant naturally produces | Can recreate scents no plant produces, like amber or musk |
| Where it excels | Topical aromatherapy, short diffusion | Sustained burn in a wax medium |
What this means for a Mikaya candle
Every fragrance oil we use is IFRA compliant and phthalate free, sourced directly from a manufacturer who issues a COA with every batch, not a trader reselling something they cannot fully account for.
We are synthetic, and we say so on the label. What we are not is unverified. That distinction, verified synthetic against unverified anything, is the one I actually care about, more than the word natural on its own.
If you want the fuller side by side on what essential oil and fragrance oil actually are, and where the natural label can be misleading on other brands' candles, that is covered in more depth in our companion piece on fragrance oil versus essential oil.
If you have a baby at home and want the honest answer on fragrance and hormone safety, that is covered separately in is it safe to burn scented candles around your baby.
And if you have ever wondered why some candles lose their scent within a few burns, we break that down in why some candles stop smelling fast.
For the full list of standards we hold across every product, not just fragrance, see our about page.
📋 The Bottom Line
Essential oils are not a lesser ingredient, they are the wrong tool for this specific job. A candle asks an oil to survive an open flame for hours, and that favors a material engineered for exactly that, not one extracted for aromatherapy or perfumery.
Fragrance oil is not automatically safer just because it is synthetic, either. Sensitization risk exists on both sides of this choice.
What actually protects anyone, the customer burning the candle or me making it, is documentation: an IFRA certificate and a COA that confirms a specific batch was formulated within tested safety margins, not a label that simply says natural or synthetic.
That is why it took six months to find a manufacturer, not a trader, willing to give a small brand that documentation. Every scent we sell carries it, and we say plainly that it is synthetic, because verified beats unverified, regardless of where an ingredient came from.
Questions people ask me about this
Does Mikaya use any essential oil at all?
Our candles, reed diffusers, and wax melts are scented with IFRA compliant fragrance oil sourced directly from a certified manufacturer. We chose this after finding essential oils unreliable and unsafe for sustained burning, not because essential oils have no value elsewhere.
Is fragrance oil bad for you?
Not inherently. The risk sits with unregulated, undocumented fragrance oil from traders with no IFRA certification or COA. A properly formulated, IFRA compliant fragrance oil is tested against usage limits for its exact product category, which is more oversight than most essential oils receive for candle use.
Isn't natural always safer than synthetic?
Not automatically. Natural origin does not exempt a material from causing skin sensitization or releasing compounds when burned. Safety comes from how a material is formulated, tested, and documented for its specific use, not from whether it started as a plant or in a lab.
Why does it matter that you source directly from a manufacturer?
A manufacturer compounds the fragrance and can issue a Certificate of Analysis and IFRA documentation for that exact batch. A trader is reselling someone else's formulation, usually without being able to produce that same paperwork, which makes the ingredient list effectively unverifiable.
This is not a decision I made once and stopped thinking about. Every new scent we develop goes through the same question: does this fragrance house have the documentation to back it, and would I be comfortable standing over this in an unventilated room for six hours straight.
If the answer is no to either, we do not use it. Have a question I have not covered here? Send it through the contact page, I read these myself.
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