Candlegraph

Start Here

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

New to Candlegraph? Here’s your guide to navigating the site.

What is Candlegraph?

Candlegraph is a data-driven candle review site. Instead of just describing scents, I measure actual performance—burn time, cost efficiency, and throw potency—to calculate objective value indexes (SAV and PAE) for each brand.

Think of it as “candle reviews meet data science.”

First Time Visitors

Start with these three posts:

Welcome to Candlegraph - Quick intro to what this site is about (2 min read)

Diptyque Narguile Review

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Diptyque is a French luxury candle house known for its complex, sophisticated scents and premium pricing. Here’s how the brand performs in the Candlegraph index (see methodology for details on SAV and PAE):

DIPTYQUE PERFORMANCE

SAV Index 132.3

PAE Index 40.7

Tier OVERACHIEVER

Introduction

A Diptyque candle was the first luxury candle I ever owned, and it was the brand that got me into scented candles in the first place. Or at least the one that led me down the rabbit hole into my current obsession. It also played an instrumental part in turning just lighting candles into my other obsession of data collection and analysis. I’ve burned more than a few Diptyque candles at this point, although I’ve only documented a handful using my current methodology. When I first began keeping track, the brand came strong out of the gate, even using my initial methods of only measuring burn time versus price. Now I’m curious to know how well it holds up against those earlier trials.

The Methodology: Inside the Candlegraph Engine

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most candle reviews are purely anecdotal. Candlegraph uses a normalized calibration engine to strip away “size bias” and “luxury markups” to find the true engineering value of a scent.

1. The Relational Baseline

All Candlegraph indexes are relational — they compare each brand’s performance against the current collection average. An index of 100 always represents the average performance across all candles in the collection.

This means:

Above 100 = Better than average
Below 100 = Below average
The baseline shifts as the collection grows

This approach naturally accounts for candle size differences because larger candles typically cost more per ounce, and price is already factored into the efficiency calculation.

Candle Burn Times v1

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Before this project started, I enjoyed scented candles as much as the next person - well, maybe a bit more than the next person - but the thought of taking measurements had not yet crossed my mind. As I’ve mentioned, I wanted to increase my Excel skills, and candles just so happened to be there. The very first candle I measured was one from Paddywax Apothecary, probably because it was the most recent candle I had purchased. The scent was Patchouli and Tobacco, and it’s one of the candles in my first presentation, so I’m sure I’ll have a separate post about it somewhere down the line. While I don’t burn candles every single day anymore, at the time, I was deep into my new obsession and quickly went down the data-gathering rabbit hole. Soon, I had recorded information about burn times, price, and weight from five different candles, and it was time to start making some of my favorite things - charts and graphs.

About

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to more information about candles than you probably ever hoped to know! I started this project as a way to use one of my hobbies – scented candles – to expand my knowledge of Excel. From there, it has grown into a full data analytics project, including the use of such tools as SQL and Tableau, both of which I’m still learning. In fact, it’s fair to say that I’m still learning about most of this, even how to best measure and analyze the data I get from burning candles. There may (read: probably will) be times when you say, “Hey wait, that’s wrong.” Please bear with me – hopefully we can learn from each other!

Welcome to Candlegraph!

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Playing with R: My First Data Visualizations

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

First, we’ll load in our libraries. I’m using library(here) on the advice of Jenny Bryan from her Project-oriented workflow post on Tidyverse. This is just to organize my project into a folder in order to keep it self-contained and portable.

# loading libraries
library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(tidyverse)
library(here)

Next, we’ll load in the data. This comes from 4 tabs of a Google Sheets file on which I’ve recorded my candle research. Variables include things such as the price and weight of a candle, as well as how long it burned.

Beginnings

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When I first started this project, I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn’t even know it would turn into a project. I just wanted something fun to work on while trying to figure out how adults use Excel. That is, for something other than just organizing a collection or making a schedule. It turns out that’s all a lot of people use Excel for, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, I wanted to take advantage of all spreadsheets have to offer, and using the data I was already gathering (but not yet recording) seemed like a good place to start. I figured that doing something fun alongside my Excel education would keep me interested and motivated, and in that I was correct. In fact it ended up growing into something much more, but in this post I want to focus on how it all began.

Welcome to Candlegraph!

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, and welcome to Candlegraph! My name is Terry, and I love scented candles. They’re a great way to turn your house into a warm and inviting home. However, not all scented candles are created equal, which is the idea behind this site.

Candlegraph

Start Here

What is Candlegraph?

First Time Visitors

Diptyque Narguile Review

Introduction

The Methodology: Inside the Candlegraph Engine

1. The Relational Baseline

Candle Burn Times v1

About

Welcome to Candlegraph!

Playing with R: My First Data Visualizations

Beginnings

Welcome to Candlegraph!

Archive