Taper™ Candle Warmer Lamp

A candle warmer lamp does one thing a match cannot: it melts the wax from above, with heat and light instead of fire. The wick never lights. Nothing burns, so nothing sooty comes off the top of the jar and settles on the ceiling above it, and the fragrance oils that a flame would destroy on its way out get released intact instead.

That is the part most people are surprised by. A lit candle is quietly combusting a good share of what you paid for - the flame sits far hotter than the wax needs to be, and the top notes go up 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, cool enough to leave it whole. The throw is softer in the first ten minutes and then it keeps going, long after a burning candle would have flattened out.

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

On the lead there is a rotary controller doing three jobs: an 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 reads as a bedside lamp that happens to smell like something; at full it takes fifteen to twenty minutes to open a melt pool. It runs from a standard socket with the halogen bulb already fitted.

Let it cool before you move it. The shade sits directly over the heat and the glass holds warmth for several minutes after the bulb goes off, so give it ten before you handle the top. Wipe the glass with a dry microfibre cloth - if wax ever spits onto it, warm the shade briefly and lift the wax away with a paper towel rather than scraping it cold. Keep water off the disc base and the inline controller, and wipe the steel dry rather than using any glass cleaner on it. Do not leave it running unattended overnight, and do not sit a candle wider than the base plate on it: the edges will not melt and the jar will not sit flat.

Matte black powder-coated steel stem, gooseneck arm and weighted disc base; ribbed pressed-glass shade with a scalloped lower rim; inline rotary controller carrying 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, not a pin adaptor.