CandleSmith - From Vibe to Wick

Inspiration

CandleSmith was inspired by Ema's own experience as a candle maker. While experimenting with scents and waxes at home, she often struggled to translate her ideas into effective candle recipes, particularly in finding the right ratios and ingredients to use. There were no tools that could generate a full candle concept with the right wax type, fragrance load, wick size, and color palette based on a mood or idea. This gap sparked the idea for CandleSmith, a tool that helps candle makers turn thoughts and vibes into ready-to-pour recipes.

What It Does

CandleSmith enables candle makers to transform their thoughts or moods into ready-to-pour recipes. You can enter your mood or hit “Generate random”, and the app creates:

a candle name and vibe description
suggest a candle color palette, ingredients, instructions, and a shopping list
allows you to customize the recipe and mock-up

What We Learned

Prompt engineering: The Google AI Studio works best when you prompt it in very small and specific chunks.
Creative thinking: Ensuring the features we wanted to build were well-thought-out

How We Built It

Built with Google AI Studio and deployed on Cloud Run, CandleSmith uses Gemini to generate structured candle recipes and mock-ups. The UI is simple: the user needs to enter their mood or select 'Generate Random,' and once they submit, a new candle concept appears with ingredients and a brief making guide.

Challenges

Keeping Gemini’s imagination realistic
Finding the right prompt for the UI, we had to iterate 7-8 times

Outcome

CandleSmith gives candle makers something unique — a creative companion that turns their thoughts, moods, or random ideas into tangible, ready-to-make candle recipes. It brings a spark of AI magic to the art of handmade craft.