Taper™ Candle Warmer Lamp

A candle warmer lamp does one thing that a match cannot: it melts the wax from above, with heat and light and no fire. The wick is never lit. Nothing burns, so no soot rises from the jar to settle on the ceiling, and the fragrance oils that a flame would destroy are released intact.

That surprises most people. A lit candle quietly burns a good part of what you paid for, because the flame is much hotter than the wax needs, and the top notes go with it. A halogen bulb held a few centimetres above the surface warms the pool to a fraction of that temperature: hot enough to release the fragrance and cool enough to leave it whole. The scent is softer for the first ten minutes and then carries on, long after a burning candle would have faded.

The lamp is a gooseneck: a weighted 13 cm disc of matte black steel, a telescopic stem rising from the back of it, and a fixed curved arm that carries the shade over the centre of the base, directly above the jar. Because the stem telescopes, you set the gap yourself, low for a tall apothecary jar and up to the full 36 cm for a wide three-wick candle. The shade is real ribbed pressed glass with a scalloped rim, not acrylic, and its flutes break the light into fine vertical lines and not one flat wash.

On the lead is a rotary controller with three functions: on/off, a dimmer with four levels and a 24-hour cycle timer set at 2, 4, 8 or 10 hours. Dimmed right down it is a bedside lamp that also scents the room, and at full power it takes fifteen to twenty minutes to open a melt pool. It runs from a standard socket and comes with the halogen bulb fitted.

Let it cool before moving it. The shade is directly over the heat and the glass stays warm for several minutes after the bulb goes off, so wait ten before handling the top. Wipe the glass with a dry microfibre cloth. If wax ever spits onto it, warm the shade briefly and lift the wax off with a paper towel; do not scrape it cold. Keep water off the disc base and the inline controller, and wipe the steel dry without glass cleaner. Do not leave it running unattended overnight, and do not put a candle wider than the base plate on it: the edges will not melt and the jar will not sit flat.

Stem, gooseneck arm and weighted disc base in matte black powder-coated steel; shade in ribbed pressed glass with a scalloped lower rim; inline rotary controller with the switch, four-level dimmer and 24-hour timer; halogen bulb fitted in the shade. Verified dimensions: 13 cm base diameter, 8 cm shade diameter, 36 cm maximum height with the telescopic stem fully extended. Shipping weight 0.83 kg. Fitted with a US plug and rated 100-127 V; outside North America it needs a step-down transformer and not a pin adaptor.