Bongazi pillar candle

Burnt orange, brown, and mustard. The motifs stack in bands around the candle: triangles, zigzags, rows of diamonds, spirals, lines of dots. At 7.5 cm across and 11.5 cm tall there’s enough of it to see from the other side of the room.

Light it when people are coming over. It’s not scented, so it won’t work against whatever is in the oven, and 64 hours of burning covers a good many evenings of company.

The painting is done by hand. The palette and the motifs are the design, and how they land is particular to the candle you get.

A workshop in South Africa makes these, with a team of more than twenty years’ standing, most of them women.

They pour fully refined paraffin into a pillar mould and leave it to set. The colour goes on after that, in non-toxic paint worked over the outside of the finished candle. Every candle is painted by hand and none is copied exactly from the last, so a design here is a palette and a set of motifs, and the arrangement is the painter’s.

Place it on a holder before you light it, with the wick trimmed to about a centimetre. Give it long enough on the first burn for the pool of wax to reach the edge. Never leave it burning unattended or near anything that flammable.