Robert Christos Nelson
I write every comparison on this site and check every figure on it. If a number here is wrong, it is mine.
I started Ember & Main because comparing candles is unreasonably hard. Prices, sizes, and burn times are published in incompatible units, half of them come from marketing copy, and almost nobody publishes the one figure that decides value: what an hour of burning actually costs.
My background is building content and data products that rank in search, which is a useful skill and also a dangerous one. It is easy to write pages that perform well and say nothing true. The discipline on this site exists to stop me doing that: prices only when I loaded the page and read them, burn times attributed to whoever published them rather than presented as fact, and no rating or review until real customers have left one.
What I am not
I am not a perfumer, a chemist, or a fragrance-industry veteran, and I do not run a testing laboratory. When this site describes what a candle smells like, that is an informed opinion and it is labelled as one. When it gives a burn time, that figure was published by a maker or a shop and it is attributed to them, never presented as something I measured. Those are different kinds of claim and I try never to blur them.