Lelo flickering touch massage candle by LELO - review by Sam (aka Jul!a)

There's a few things you could use this candle for. The most obvious being for massages, since it is a massage candle. You can of course burn it just to enjoy the very light scent, or to have some extra light around. It looks nice pretty much everywhere you place it, and the scent is just wonderful. It'd be a much better product if the oil had any lasting power however.

In its solid state, the wax is, well, pretty solid. The parts that have been melted and then re-solidified have a very smooth texture to them, and melt ever so slightly at body temperature if you run your fingers across it. Just enough that you can melt some onto your finger to use as a little bit of moisturizer.

When melted, the oil pours pretty well. It goes on nicely and doesn't leave either of us feeling greasy, oily, or even waxy. It's obviously pretty liquidy, and if you pour it into a crevasse or crease, it'll stay put for the most part, but it does run downhill really easily.

This candle comes in a few different scents: black pepper & pomegranate, vanilla & creme de cacao, and snow pear & cedarwood. I have the vanilla and creme de cacao, and I can smell a very subtle light, crisp vanilla, and some subtle hints of white chocolate. I really can't quite put my finger on anything more specific than that, but I can tell you that I do enjoy the scent quite a bit.

However for as much as I like the scent, it's just not really there. If I have the candle sitting near me in some manner, I can sometimes catch the scent subtly 'wafting on the breeze,' but otherwise I can't really smell it, even when lit. It sticks a little stronger when put on the skin, however it's still fairly subtle, and you have to be pretty close to smell it.

Every time I smell it, even when lit, the scent always seems to smell cool temperature wise, like a cool fall day or something like that.

I was really unimpressed. I mean, it performed great while it lasted, but for us, it only lasted a good minute or so. I'm a pretty tiny person, and a half dollar size dollop on my back lasted about 5 minutes before my skin started to feel like normal, only a slight bit oilier due to the massage oil here. My husband has rather large pores, and a dollop about a half dollar size lasted me on his back about a minute and a half.

During the very tiny sliver of awesome, it was pretty awesome. Gliding was nice and easy, there wasn't a waxy buildup that you sometimes see with massage candles in use, and the scent wafted up in nice little waves.

Burning it however, not so awesome. The first time I lit it, I had it lit for almost 2 hours. In that time, it couldn't manage to burn evenly. Since then, all it's done is tunnel down, no matter how long I keep it lit for. Pouring it kinda sucked too. Since there's no spout and no spoon, your only option is to just tilt and go with it. But it dribbles a lot down the side, and you have to make sure you catch that or it can get on whatever you set it down on.

The good news overall: neither of us felt the need to go scrub it off.

Like pretty much everything else LELO, the packaging screams "class." You start by looking at the all black box with a nice picture of the candle on one side and a silhouette on the front, and on the back there's a how to use section. They recommend that you enjoy the gentle fragrance until you are ready to use the oil. Extinguish the flame and allow everything to cool for 30 seconds, and pour into your hands and massage into the skin. (You can pour it directly onto the area to be massaged too). The ingredients are also listed on the back of the box as well: Glycine soja (soy) wax, butyrospermum parkii (shea butter), prunus armeniaca (apricot) kernel oil, perfume (benzyl benzoate, vanillin, coumarin).

The candle itself is really nice. A black glass jar holds all the wax, and as it burns, it glows nicely too. I have to look at mine real carefully, because the wax around the edges just won't go away to let a lot of the light shine through. The lid is slightly less impressive with its plastic handle, but does function nicely to keep dust and other particles out of your wax. The jar does say LELO on it in the middle of the front, and in small letters on the back also has the website.

Here you can see the tunneling of the candle, and if you look closely, I think you can see where the wax that wasn't melted started to look "dried out." I'd also like to point out that even with all of that wax gone, there were only 3 or 4 backrubs given...


And here I tried to capture the 'glow' as well as the front of the candle, and one of the aforementioned wax drips:

I had heard so many awesome things about this that I had to buy it. And then I used it, and was less than blown away. I did like that the wax seemed to burn a little cooler than some of the others I've tried, when it hit my skin, it was quite literally, the perfect temperature. I didn't like that it only seemed to last a few minutes. I also don't like that no matter what I did I couldn't get it to burn evenly, the scent is barely there most of the time, and for whatever reason, after having this used on me, my back itched on and off for a few days. I don't know for sure that this caused the itching, but it wasn't 'normal' itching, and it happened right after my husband stopped massaging me.

The jar itself is beautiful, and everything about this was nice enough that I got my husband's parents the snow pear one for Christmas. I hadn't used ours til after we gave them theirs, but my mother in law seems happy with it.

Overall, this candle was a bit of a disappointment for me. I'll keep burning it until I can't burn it anymore, then I'm going to cut up the rest of the hunks of wax that the wick couldn't seem to handle, and I'll burn those on one of those little hot oil diffuser thingies with the tealight candles.