Nestled between the other businesses that occupy space in the mixed-use 801 Building at Oak Park Avenue and Van Buren Street, you’ll find a cute little shop that offers healthy candle and home fragrance options.
Dr. Cheryl P. Washington, owner and head curator of Civinte, 807 S. Oak Park Ave. with two business models, Healthy Home Fragrances and Civinte Candle Bar, has occupied the space for a little over three years now and has been in business for seven.
A board-certified family nurse practitioner by profession, Washington has been making candles for about 25 years. She learned the hard way, through her child’s illness, that some candles can be harmful to lungs.
“I grew up in a household where my mom burned everything such as incense, potpourri…our home always smelled lovely with Vanilla Fields (fragrance) and it was always just great scents in the air,” Washington said of where her love for home scents stems from.
A big consumer of scented candles in her own home as an adult, Washington burned them from sunup to sundown. That ritual however, led to one of her now grown children, being hospitalized in the late 1990s due to breathing difficulties where he was admitted to pediatric ICU.
Fast forward, during her child’s third hospital admission, one of the doctors told her and husband they needed to stop smoking. The odd thing was, neither of them smoked.
“My mother smoked but never near my children so we knew he wasn’t exposed to cigarette smoke,” Washington said.
After walking the doctor through her child’s medical history, Washington remembered that lighting candles every morning was part of her daily ritual.
“The pulmonologist had just gone to a conference where they discussed the harmful effects of paraffin wax candles, which is what most candles were primarily,” Washington explained. “Paraffin is a derivative of petroleum gas and can be harmful to most people. Not everyone is going to be affected but some will and some, is enough.”
Needless to say, Washington stopped burning the candles and decided to use research along with her science background to figure out how to create a healthier candle option for use in her home.
Her research found beeswax candles are the healthiest candles in the market.
“It’s a harder wax so it’s good for tapered candles and pillar candles, not jar container candles where you put a fragrance in it because it’s such a hard wax,” Washington explained. “More importantly for me it’s going to alter the smell of the fragrance you use because bees wax has a naturally sweet smell.”
Washington learned also about soy wax which she said is now really expensive.
“I started using soy because it was the next healthiest option,” Washington said. “I have soy in my brand because even though it’s gone up significantly in price, it’s still low enough to offer at a cheaper price point for those who maybe cannot afford our coconut wax candles which is a luxury wax. I make sure that the waxes I use in my brand are vegan, one hundred percent no paraffin and no additives.”
Half of the business focuses on providing healthier candle alternatives which she makes by hand in her shop that offers vegan wax candles, soy wax melts and room sprays that are nontoxic. The candle bar also offers customers the opportunity to walk into the shop and use those same healthy ingredients to create their own candles, room sprays or reed diffuser scents.
“We provide our candles online or you can walk into the store and buy them,” Washington said. “I also provide them wholesale. Right now, our candles are in the Rush Oak Park Hospital gift shop. We also make private labels. We have a couple of celebrity clients that we make their candles and they slap their labels on there.”
More than 125 different fragrances are offered. Customers can choose up to three to create their own scents.
“No two scents are alike,” Washington said. “Based on the different types of oils we have, about 253,000 different scents can be created.
A broad range of customers from date night, ladies’ night, birthday celebrations, team building, sororities and fraternities spend time creating in the candle bar.
Washington loves her front-facing Oak Park Avenue location as it offers great visibility for pedestrian, vehicle and commuter traffic.
“I love Southtown because we support each other,” Washington said of the camaraderie between her and the other business owners. “When my customers want to get something to eat, we point them to the restaurants that are on the block. We have Margaritas, Sen Sushi, the Ale House, Addis Cafe. So we’re always sending customers to them and people are sent from the restaurants to us.”
Addis Cafe co-owner, Kalkidan Tesfaye, agrees the businesses there support one another.
“This is a very short block but a very supportive block like Cheryl said,” Tesfaye said. “It takes a community to succeed and this block is amazing. It’s been nothing but good for us as well.”
Washington has seen continued growth and credits signing with Groupon in helping with that growth.
“We get people from across the world that have come into Civinte,” she said. “I think we’re now eight countries in terms of customers that have come in on holiday that found us on Groupon. They come in and they take our products back to their countries.”
Candles are a $3 billion dollar industry, according to Washington.
“You have to really think back to historically what candles meant,” Washington said to explain their popularity. “At one point in time, it was our source of light. From there, there’s a religious aspect to it for use in religious ceremonies and then there’s aroma therapy. Aroma therapy is anything that has the ability to alter the mind whether it’s good or bad, happy or sad. It triggers memories and creates memories.”
For more information go to the website at Civinte.com or on Facebook at Civinte Candle Bar.
