Dressing Your Candles

Candle Magick – Dressing Candles

Candle Magick is one of the most (if not “the” most) popular and easiest ways to perform spells.

Candles represent your desire, that which you wish to grow or banish and they can also be representative of a person much like using a poppet.

What is “Dressing a Candle”?

The process of “Dressing your candle” simply means anointing, carving and adding botanicals to your candle prior to lighting your spell candle.

When we dress a candle, we are adding appropriate herbs and oils to enhance the spell and make the connection/representation of the candle to what our goal is much stronger.

Dressing Your Candle: Oils

Using oils is a long standing tradition among many cultures and traditions. Generally, when we use oils to dress a candle we use base oils rather than essential oils, though blends are also extremely popular especially if you are not adding botanicals to your dressed candle as many ritual blends also contain botanicals in the bottle.

Choose your oil (I have provided a basic chart at the end of this article to help you).

The “standard” way to anoint a candle with oils is as follows:

1. Add a small amount of oil either to your candle or fingers.
2. Starting in the middle of your candle, rub upwards to attract and down to banish/release.
3. Use your intuition to decide if you’d prefer to start in the middle or at one of the candle ends, be careful not to oil the wick.

Dressing Your Candle: Herbs/Botanicals

If you decide to add botanicals to your candle, this can be done easily in a few different ways.

My personal two methods of dressing candles with botanicals are:

1. Rolling the candle (either oiled, or a beeswax candle) over the dried herbs or botanical powders to coat the candle.
2. Not “dressed” as such, but sprinkling the botanicals around the candle itself.

If dressing with botanicals, you’ll need to either use beeswax candles (the ones with the honeycomb pattern are best) or an oiled candle as you’ll need your herbs to "stick" to the candle.

You can also use “sachet” or “blowing” powders and simply either sprinkle this on and over your candle or gently blow the powder onto your candle – which then also infuses with your breathe.

Dressing Your Candle: Carving

Carving candles can be so much fun and an entirely spiritual and magickal process all in itself.

When we carve into a candle for spellwork, we are infusing the energies not only of the symbols or words carved, but also our own power and energy.

The easiest way to carve a candle is to use something small like a pin or needle – especially if you don’t have carving tools lying around. You can also use a sharpened pencil ;)

Decide whether you want to carve words, phrases/chant or symbols and sigils into your candle. This may depend on the size of your candle too, smaller taper candles will not fit as much on them as larger pillar candles for example. Whatever you decide will be perfectly fine!

Carved candles can then be anointed with oils, perhaps also dressed with botanicals or simply left as they are as the carved candle is already dressed as is with your intention.

Base Oils Chart

~ Lyllith Dragonheart

Photos of my own work & products – all products shown are available in online store ;)

Originally written for and published in Mystic Tribe Magazine, December 2019