Zahabu pillar candle

Bright orange and red, with black triangles, diamonds, spirals, and white dots and curls. It is 7.5 cm across and 11.5 cm tall.

It’s unscented, and it burns for about 64 hours. Light it during mealtimes and put it out when you clear the table, and one candle lasts the season.

Painted by hand on every candle. Yours will carry this palette and these marks, but the details may be a little different.

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.