Home & Cleaning

Most candles are petroleum wax and undisclosed synthetic fragrance, burned in a closed room for hours. Here are the non-toxic candles that skip all of it, vetted on wax, wick, and scent.

The claim that paraffin candles poison your air traces back further than you’d expect to a single conference presentation. The case against paraffin is real, but it isn’t the one the internet makes.

A badly burning soy candle put out roughly twenty times the particulate of a well-behaved paraffin one. The wax on the label matters far less than whether the flame is stable.

Every clean candle brand picks one of three waxes and tells you theirs is best. Each has a real advantage and a real problem, and none of them is the obvious winner.

For decades candle wicks had metal cores to hold them upright, and some of that metal was lead. The US banned it in 2003, which settles less than you’d hope.

Most cleaning sprays hide their ingredients behind one word and fill your home with fumes you didn’t agree to breathe. Here are the non-toxic cleaning brands that clean well and tell you what’s inside.

One certifies that the fiber was grown organically and the people making it were treated fairly. The other tests the finished fabric for harmful substances and says nothing about either. Brands let you assume they’re interchangeable.

The finish that keeps sheets crisp out of the dryer is a resin that slowly gives off formaldehyde. There’s no federal limit on how much can be in a textile sold in the US, and no requirement to tell you it’s there.

A 1000-thread-count sheet is often four-ply yarn counted four times. The number that actually predicts how sheets feel and how long they last is printed far less often, and it isn’t a number at all.