Shipping candles to the United States

Candles are on the carrier's list

Candle makers meet this subject through their carrier rather than through American law. La Poste lists candles among household products needing the reinforced declaration, so the parcel is stopped at the counter long before any question of testing arises.

That is worth separating carefully from the American question, because the two do not say the same thing. The carrier decides what it will accept; CPSC decides what has to be certified. A product can be on the first list without a certificate being required at all.

The only candle rule is about the wick

On the American side, candles appear once, and through a single component: metal-cored candlewicks, under a banning regulation. It is not a performance standard about burn time or wax; it is a ban aimed at what the wick is made of.

Certification against a ban is its own small subject, and CPSC has issued guidance about which bans require a certificate, which is why the rule appears on the list of those requiring a general certificate.

In practice, most European candle makers use cotton or wood wicks and are not in this case. But the question to put to your supplier is precise and answerable: does this wick contain a metal core, and can you say so in writing?

The reason this rule exists at all is worth a sentence, because it tells you what to look for. Metal-cored wicks were used to keep a wick upright in soft wax, and the ones that mattered contained lead, which burns off into the room. A wick that is stiff for another reason - a wooden wick, a cotton wick with a paper core - is not what the ban is aimed at.

Otherwise the parcel carries a declaration

If no rule requiring a certificate applies to your candle, you do not write a certificate. You declare, and CPSC's guidance describes the case in plain words.

Two things still deserve attention even then. Glass containers, decorative accessories and packaging are their own products and are judged on their own terms. And a scented candle sold as a child's night light is no longer a candle, in the sense that matters here: it is a product intended for a child.

The shortest route for a candle maker

For most workshops this is a fifteen-minute job rather than a project: confirm the wick, produce the declaration with its intended use code, and prepare the annex that goes on each parcel. The long version only starts if a metal core turns up.

Keep the supplier's written answer with the document. The value of a declaration is not the piece of paper, it is being able to show, months later, what it was based on.

• What a Disclaim declares
• The annex that goes on the parcel
• The whole procedure, in order