Floating roses - candle by Bell-A-Roma candles - review by Jul!a

Small floating candles are often a cute and fairly cheap way to spice up any decor. The best use for these would be as accent pieces in a glass bowl or cup. They won't do all that well in something like a bath tub, so the small glass containers are your best bet. I recommend glass for a couple of reasons. One reason being that things like wood or plastic might catch on fire or melt. You'd be better with wood than plastic, but glass won't be harmed at all. Also, the flames just look so pretty in a glass bowl with some water in it. You'll want to make sure to keep an eye on them though, I haven't had any problems yet with candles like this but my mother used to do the same thing with floating candles a lot when she was younger and had one sort of glob up on the side of the glass bowl and cause it to explode.

In this set, you get a total of 6 rose shaped candles. They're each about 2" across and about half an inch tall. All the candles are made with a palm wax base and are supposed to burn for 30 - 60 minutes. After 15-20 they had some good size dents in them. The first candle started to show signs of weakness at about 45 minutes but was still going strong nonetheless. After about an hour and a half one of the wicks had fallen considerably and was laying in the pool of melted wax, but was still burning. At an hour forty, one of the candles had finally burned itself out. 10 minutes later all but two were out on their own and at that point I blew out the two that were still lit. That's almost twice the max burn time they say you'll get.



I have the yellow ones and they are indeed rose scented. Or something like that. Think more like a potpourri or some other generic rose scent. It didn't really bother me, but those with sensitive noses should beware, especially when you first open the package. After being out for a bit and being lit the scent seemed to diminish quite a bit.

The wicks should be trimmed down to 1/4", but don't necessarily have to. I didn't trim mine, and they burned just fine the whole time. The wicks are coated in the same wax as the candle, so it might take a second or two for the flame to catch. If you're using smaller glass containers, be careful when placing a lit candle so you don't burn yourself.

They look really great burning in a container filled with water. It's just something about the way the light reflects and all that. As mentioned above, these aren't the best things to be floating around in your bathtub. It won't take much turbulence to knock them over as even putting them in the water feels like they're about to capsize (they won't though).

You can use any size glass container that you want to hold however many of them that you want. If you put them all in one large bowl, they seem to have a tendency to migrate towards each other depending on air flow and all that. You could also separate them out into little bowls or even small drinking glasses. Here's how I did them.

One in a small glass bowl:



One in a drinking glass:



And if you were going to do a centerpiece or anything like that, I'd recommend a large glass bowl like below:

I'm pretty impressed with these. I've had them for quite a while, never quite getting around to doing anything with them because I figured they'd probably crap out in 20 or 30 minutes and not do much else. With how shallow they looked I wasn't even sure they were going to float, but they did. And they burned nearly twice as long as they were supposed to, which impressed me even more. They don't appear to be available for purchase at the moment, but they were pretty cheap. Cheap enough that I'd buy them again in the future for a bubble bath or two, or even as a decorative centerpiece at a get together.