When lighting your candle for the first time, make sure to burn until you reach a full melt pool — that is, until the melted wax has reached the edges of the vessel — approximately 3 hours for our 8 oz candles and 1 hour for our mini candles. Candles have memory and if you don’t burn to a full melt pool in your first burn, the candle can possibly “tunnel,” which means it will burn down instead of out and down.