About

Our Story

Hand-poured in Houston, blended by a chemist

I'm Minah Lee, the founder of LH Candle Studio. Everything we sell is made by hand in a small studio in Houston, Texas — and every scent in the collection was blended, poured, and burned down at my own kitchen table before it ever reached yours.

From Seoul to a Houston kitchen

Before candles, I was a chemical and pharmaceutical patent researcher for the Korean government in Seoul. My days were spent reading formulations; my evenings, increasingly, were spent blending fragrance oils at home. Organic chemistry turns out to be unusually good training for perfumery — both are the patient work of learning how small changes in a structure change everything you notice about it.

In 2016 my husband's work brought our family to Houston. In a new city, in a new language, the studio table was the place that still made sense. I started pouring again, mostly as gifts for friends. They kept asking for more, then they started asking for ones they could buy for other people. In 2018, LH Candle Studio became a real business.

It has stayed a small one on purpose. I still blend every fragrance myself, still pour in batches small enough to keep an eye on, and still test each new scent for weeks in an ordinary room before it earns a label.

What we make

Three ways to bring scent into a home, for three different kinds of rooms and moments.

Soy candles — 10 oz of American-grown soy wax in a glass vessel with a wood lid, with a burn time of up to 60 hours. For the rooms where you sit down and stay a while.

Wax bar fresheners — flameless scent for the places a candle doesn't belong. A drawer, a closet, a car, a small bathroom. The scent holds for months, and a light scratch across the surface wakes it up again.

Reed diffusers — steady, quiet fragrance that asks nothing of you. Set it down in an entryway and forget about it.

How it's made

American-grown 100% soy wax. Paper and cotton wicks with no zinc core. Phthalate-free fragrance oils. Nothing is poured in a factory, and nothing ships before it has been checked by hand.

A good candle is mostly patience: the right wick for the right vessel, the right fragrance load for the wax, and enough test burns to know it will throw evenly in a real room rather than on paper. That testing is the part of this work I enjoy most, and it is the reason the collection grows slowly.

Where to find us

Beyond this shop, you'll find us at markets around Houston and on the shelves of a handful of stores we're glad to be part of. Come say hello — scent is difficult to describe and easy to recognize, and it is always better in person.

Upcoming markets and events  ·  Find us in stores

Scent reaches memory before it reaches anything else. That's the part I care about — a room that smells like somewhere you want to be.

— Minah