‍Can You Actually Burn Your Babybel?

Short answer: Sure. But you’d be making the exact candle our own guide tells you not to.

Babybel wax is made of fully refined paraffin wax, microcrystalline wax, and a small percentage of polyethylene, colored with food dyes (the red coating uses Red #40). It’s food-safe and meets FDA standards for wax that touches food. It is also, almost entirely, petroleum. Paraffin is the default max in most conventional candles, and it’s a byproduct of crude oil refining. A few other quirks before you start saving shells: 

• It burns differently: Microcrystalline wax is stickier and melts at a higher temperature than a standard candle paraffin, so a wick sized for a normal candle can struggle. That’s how you get tunneling, a drowning flame, or a sooty one. One DIYer noted her microcrystalline-heavy candle made the room a little smoky. 
• The dye isn’t candle dye. Candle makers use dyes formulated to dissolve in wax and wick cleanly. Food coloring on a cheese coating was never designed to be burned, and pigment can clog a wick
• It may smell like cheese. Dealbreaker or selling point? You do you, no judgement. 
• You need a lot of it. Like 40+ wrappers for a single 4-ounce jar. At our household’s rate, that’s two weeks of hoarding for a candle the size of a tea light’s older sibling. 

The Climate Math is Counterintuitive

Parrafin sitting in a landfill barely breaks down, which means it isn’t producing methane the way food scraps do. The carbon in it mostly stays put. Burn it, and that fossil carbon goes into the atmosphere as CO2. My back of the napkin math: Paraffin is roughly 85% carbon by weight, so a 4-ounce paraffin candle releases 350 grams of CO2 when fully burned. Not insane, but not nothing. The real sustainability win of the TikTok is the candle you didn’t buy: no new jar, no new wax, no shipping box. If your Babybel candle replaces a purchase, great. If it’s a bonus candle you’d never have lit otherwise, it’s a cute craft. 

Our candle guide spends a lot of time on wax: paraffin versus soy versus beeswax. That still matters fo resourcing, deforestation and fossil fuel reasons, but when I went looking for what actually drives the pollution you breathe at home, the research kept pointing somewhere else: how the flame behaves. Scientists have known this for decades. A 1999 Caltech study of paraffin and beeswax church candles identified three distinct burning modes. During normal burning, candles emitted low amounts of very tiny particles. In “sooting” mode, they pumped out much higher amounts of black carbon. During smoldering right after the candle was put out, they released most of their total particle mass. 

What pushes a candle into sooting mode is mostly drafts. A study in Sweden burned five types of candles in a lab chamber with fluctuating airflow to mimic and open window or nearby vent. For every candle type, soot dominated the emissions once the flame started flickering. The flame gets cooled by moving air, so it can’t finish burning of the soot it creates, and that soot escapes into the room. 

Unfortunately, the “natural” candles don’t get a free pass. A 2026 study that compared soy, beeswax and paraffin candles found that natural candles, especially those with multiple wicks or wooden wicks, can burn unstably and still produce a substantial amount of ultrafine particles. The researchers also found that wax type alone didn’t predict VOC exposure. Ultrafine particles matter mostly because of size. Candle particles average around 7 to 8 nanometers, compared to roughly 80 nanometers from cooking, and smaller particles travel deeper into your lungs. Fun! 

If you've ever read a candle brand's "why soy" page, you've probably seen a claim that paraffin releases toluene and benzene. That traces back to 2009 research from South Carolina State University that was presented at an American Chemical Society meeting. Meanwhile, the candle industry points to an industry-funded 2007 study that found paraffin, soy, palm, stearin, and beeswax candles all burned similarly when well made. Neither source is exactly neutral, and I'd take both with a grain of salt (or a Babybel).

Wait, Should I Panic?

After reading this, I briefly considered throwing out every candle in my house and living by the glow of my phone screen, just as they did in the olden days. Then I kept reading and I’d like to talk us both off the ledge. 

Lighting a candle at night is nowhere near living in a heavily polluted city. Outdoor air pollution follows you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A candle affects your air for the hour or two it's burning and a little while after. When I did some rough math, a nightly candle nudges your overall exposure about as much as the difference between living in a very clean American city and a fairly average one. Worth knowing about, and you can keep sleeping just fine.

It's in the same league as cooking dinner. When researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark had young adults with mild asthma sit in a room with burning candles for five straight hours, far longer and more intense than a typical evening, most lung function measures didn't change significantly. Participants did report more irritation, and researchers found signs of mild inflammation. The kicker: when the same people sat in a room with cooking fumes instead, the results were pretty similar. Nobody is telling you to stop making dinner.

Who should take it more seriously? Anyone with asthma or other lung conditions, babies and little kids, and anyone burning candles for hours in a small, closed-up room. And if your candle leaves black marks on the jar, the wall, or the ceiling, that's soot, and it's your candle telling you something's off.

How To Burn Like A Rock Star 

•     Trim the wick to 1/4 inch before every burn. Long wicks make big, flickery, sooty flames.

•     Keep it out of the wind. No vents, fans, open windows, doorways, or high-traffic hallways.

•     Snuff it or dip it. Blowing out a candle creates that smoldering plume. A snuffer, a lid, or dipping the wick into the melted wax with a wick dipper cuts it down.

•     Ventilate after, not during. Crack a window or run a fan once the candle is out, when a draft can't mess with the flame.

•     Skip the bedroom. According to the NFPA, 37% of home candle fires start in bedrooms. Falling asleep was a factor in 11% of candle fires and 21% of the associated deaths.

•     Stop before the bottom. The NFPA recommends putting candles out when they're within 2 inches of the holder.

DIY: Give Your Candle Stubs A Second Life

If the TikTok has you itching to melt things, the best raw material is probably already in your house: that last inch of expensive wax stranded at the bottom of your jars once the wick gives up. I have at least four of these on a shelf right now, and I refuse to acknowledge how much I paid for them.

What you'll need

•     Leftover wax. Sort by type if you can: beeswax with beeswax, soy with soy. Mixed waxes melt at different temperatures and burn less predictably. Babybel shells can go in, but blend them in rather than going 100% cheese.

•     A pre-tabbed cotton wick sized for your jar's diameter. Wick suppliers publish sizing charts, and a too-small wick is the number one reason homemade candles tunnel.

•     A heat-safe container. Thick glass jars, tins, or ceramic. Skip thin drinking glasses and anything cracked, since they can shatter.

•     A double boiler, or a heat-safe pitcher set in a pot of simmering water.

•     Two chopsticks or a clothespin to hold the wick centered.

How to do it

1.   Free the wax. Pop old jars in the freezer for a few hours. The wax shrinks and usually releases with a butter knife. You can also set the jar in hot water to loosen it.

2.   Clean it up. Pull out the old metal wick tabs and pick out any soot or debris.

3.   Melt low and slow. Use the double boiler, never direct heat or the microwave. Melted wax is a flammable liquid. If it ever catches fire, smother it with a lid and never use water.

4.   Set your wick. Dip the tab in a little melted wax, press it to the center of the jar bottom, and clamp the top between your chopsticks.

5.   Pour. Pour slowly, leaving about half an inch of headspace. Let it cool at room temperature. The fridge speeds things up but can cause cracks and sinkholes.

6.   Wait and trim. Let it cure overnight, trim the wick to 1/4 inch, and on the first burn, let it go until the melted pool reaches the edges so it doesn't tunnel.

What about scent? I'd skip it. If you can't live without it, keep it to a few drops of essential oil. Fragrance compounds, including natural ones like the terpenes in citrus and pine oils, react with ozone in indoor air to form new nanoparticles. 

Fun activity for the kids? Mine will be in charge of eating the cheese. Hot wax stays with the grown-ups.