Freezing Candles to Prolong Burning and Preventing Drips

"freezing candles not only makes them burn slower, but can prevent them from dripping" 

This was a really interesting pin to test out. My original theory on this was honestly it wasn't going to make  difference, assuming that any temperature change freezing the candle would have made would quickly fade once it was brought out into a room of steady 70* temperature and lit. In fact, googling brought up a handful of sites that also agreed with this theory.  

As soon as I saw this pin I went to my drawer of candles and was ready to test it out. Yes, I really do have an entire dresser drawer dedicated to candles. Despite what you might read on pinterest, crayons and Crisco are no replacement for good candles. Unfortunately when going through my stash, I realized I mostly have hundreds of tea lights, larger scented decorative candles, and only two matching unscented plain wax votive candles. I wanted uniformity, candles of the same brand, same size, and unscented, with out coloring to assure nothing would get in the way of results. I would have liked to have had at least a half dozen to assure clear results, but I decided to test this out regardless.

One candle was left in the drawer at room temperature, while the other one was left in the freezer for a week. I pulled out the candle and wrote "Frozen" on it, to assure the candles wouldn't get mixed up, and then placed them both on the same style of dish on my china hutch. They both lit just fine and I decided to check back in 30 minutes to see how they were doing. 

(Room temperature on the left, frozen on the right) 

I was amazed to see after the first 30 minute mark that the frozen candle appeared to be burning slower - the ring of melted wax was much smaller than it was on the room temperature candle. This was actually starting to look promising! 

However, when I checked back again in another 30 minutes, the tides had changed. The frozen candle still had a smaller area of melted wax, but had clearly burnt down faster than the room temperature candle. I kept checking back every 30 minutes, and it became clear that the frozen candle was actually burning faster then the room temperature one was, by quite a lot. 

You can see here the candles, side by side, after just about 2 hours of burning.

So I'm going to say this is a bad idea, most other articles on this I've read have said that it doesn't do anything as far as extending the life of the candles and how fast they burn, and if my test is a sign of anything, it actually makes them burn far faster. Honestly though I WILL be testing this out again with a larger amount of candles, the sheer difference in burning just the two candles makes me think this can't be a fluke. And drips? Yeah that's a no. The frozen candle ended up spewing and dripping wax so badly that I'm glad I had set it on a dish before lighting it. The room temperature candle didn't drip and didn't leak at all, though it also didn't burn down as far a the frozen candle did.