Of candles, wax warmers and liquid potpourri, the potpourri is the one that causes genuine chemical burns. It holds detergents that damage a cat’s mouth and throat, and a cat only needs to walk through a spill and groom their paws. Do not try to make your cat vomit. Offer water, rinse the fur, and get them seen now.
Why the candle season is an emergency season
Once the clocks go back the evenings are dark by five, the heat is on, and candles, wax warmers and simmering pots come out and stay out. They are left burning for hours, often on a mantel, a windowsill or a side table, which are exactly the surfaces a cat uses as a walkway.
The three products in this article cause three different injuries. Liquid potpourri is a chemical burn. A wax warmer is a thermal burn. An open candle is a burn and a fire risk. All three are at cat height and all three are most often left unattended.
Liquid potpourri: the serious one
Simmering potpourri and liquid potpourri are not just scented oil and water. They contain cationic detergents, which are corrosive, and that is what does the damage rather than the fragrance.
Cats are affected far more often than dogs, for three reasons. They jump onto warm surfaces. They investigate with their faces. Once anything is on their coat or paws, they groom it off within minutes, which converts a splash into a swallow. And they are more susceptible to begin with: a cat’s mouth is damaged at lower concentrations than a dog’s, and a cat’s liver clears the oil component poorly.
What it looks like:
- Heavy drooling, often the first and most obvious sign
- Pawing at the mouth, or rubbing the face along the floor
- White or raw patches on the tongue, lips and gums
- Difficulty swallowing, or repeated attempts to swallow
- Refusing food and water, including the next day
- Vocalizing, hiding, or obvious distress
- Red, sore or weeping skin where the liquid touched, often hidden under fur
- Vomiting, sometimes with blood
- A raised temperature
- Weakness, wobbliness, collapse or a seizure, which is the version that cannot wait for anything at all
- Coughing or laboured breathing if any was inhaled
Two features make this worth acting on immediately. The damage is progressive, so a mouth that looks mildly sore in the first hour can look considerably worse by the third. And the injury is not only where you can see it: the throat and the food pipe can be affected with very little to look at in the mouth itself. Weeks later, a food pipe that has healed with scarring can narrow, which is a much harder problem than the original burn.
What to do, in order:
- Do not make your cat vomit. Bringing a corrosive liquid back up runs it over the same tissue a second time and makes the injury worse. This is the single most important line in this article.
- Do not give anything to neutralize it. No vinegar, no baking soda, nothing. You cannot know what you would be neutralizing, and if the product is acidic or alkaline the reaction itself generates heat and adds a burn to a burn.
- If your cat can swallow normally, offer a small amount of water or milk to drink. Dilution helps. Do not force it or syringe it, because a cat who cannot swallow properly will inhale it.
- Rinse the coat and paws with lukewarm water and a mild dish soap for at least fifteen to twenty minutes, gently, then rinse thoroughly. Wear gloves. This matters as much as the mouth, because the grooming continues all the way here.
- Flush the eyes with lukewarm water or sterile saline for at least twenty minutes if any went near them, in breaks if your cat will not tolerate it in one go.
- Bring the bottle or the pot. The ingredient panel tells us what we are dealing with.
- Come in. Phone us on the way if you can, or have a passenger phone.
Wax warmers and melts: a thermal burn at paw height
An electric wax warmer holds a pool of melted wax hot enough to burn skin, and the plate underneath is hotter still. A cat who jumps onto a shelf and puts a paw in it, or knocks the dish over onto themselves, gets a contact burn that is hidden by fur for the first day.
Burns on fur-covered skin are deceptive. The first day often shows almost nothing. Over the following two or three days the area declares itself: the fur goes stiff or comes away, the skin underneath turns red, dark or leathery, and the animal becomes sore and starts licking at it. If your pet has had hot wax on them, come in rather than waiting to see how it looks, because early care changes how long this takes to heal.
For a fresh burn: run cool water over the area for ten to twenty minutes, cool rather than icy, and stop sooner if your pet starts to get cold. Do not use ice. Do not pick or peel the hardened wax off, because the skin can come with it. Put nothing else on it at all, and do not cover it. Then come in.
Swallowed wax is usually the least of it. Paraffin wax is largely inert and a small amount passes through. A large volume, or a wick with a metal core, is an obstruction risk and worth a call to whichever of us is open.
Open candles
The familiar hazards are real and they are mostly about placement. A cat’s tail passing over a flame singes before the cat notices. Whiskers and face fur catch when a cat leans in to investigate a scent. A tea light in a glass holder gets hot enough to burn a paw pad long after you have stopped thinking of it as hot, and that is handled the same way as a wax burn: cool water, then come in. And a candle knocked off a mantel by a tail is how house fires start. A pet brought out of a fire or a smoky room needs to be seen even if they look unhurt, because airway swelling and the effects of smoke are both delayed.
Singed whiskers, curled face fur, or a singed tail or flank mean the animal was close to real heat. That is worth coming in for even with no obvious burn, because we would want to look at the eyes, the nose and the inside of the mouth, and to think about whether anything was inhaled.
The simplest fix in this whole article is a flameless LED candle on the surfaces a cat uses, and real flames only where a cat cannot go and only while someone is in the room.
Our hours are the opposite of most clinics
We are an emergency hospital, so we are open when day practices are closed. Monday to Friday we are open 5:00 PM to 8:00 AM. On Saturday we open at 4:00 PM and run through to 8:00 AM. On Sundays and statutory holidays we are open 24 hours.
That means the gap is the weekday working day. If this happens between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM Monday to Friday, or between 8:00 AM and 4:00 PM on a Saturday, phone your own daytime veterinary practice and go there. Do not wait for us to open at five, because with liquid potpourri in particular the damage builds through those hours. Outside those times, come to us.
Come in through our emergency surgical services where a burn or an obstruction needs it. Our pet diagnostics team images the chest and abdomen where something has been inhaled or swallowed, and our medical services team manages pain, fluids and the overnight monitoring that a corrosive injury usually needs.
Our guide to toxic plants and pet emergencies in Surrey covers the other category of household exposure we see brought in after hours.
Setting the room up
- Switch to flameless candles on cat-accessible surfaces. Mantels, windowsills, shelves and side tables are all cat walkways.
- Stop using liquid or simmering potpourri if you have a cat. There is no safe way to leave an open pot of it at cat height, and the injury it causes is out of proportion to the pleasure of the scent.
- Put wax warmers where a jump cannot reach, and unplug them when you leave the room.
- Never leave a flame unattended, including for the few minutes it takes to answer the door.
- Use a wide, heavy, stable base rather than a narrow candlestick.
- Move everything. If your cat has already shown interest in a particular surface, that surface is not a candle surface.
- Keep the bottle, not just the scent. If you do use any scented product, keep the packaging so the ingredients can be read in a hurry.
- Watch the dog’s tail as well. A big tail at coffee-table height clears a surface without the dog noticing.
Questions we are asked
My cat walked through spilled potpourri and licked her paws. She seems fine. Do I wait?
No. This is the presentation that looks mildest early and gets worse over the following hours, because the detergent keeps working on the tissue after contact. Rinse her paws and coat thoroughly with lukewarm water and mild soap, offer a little water to drink if she is swallowing normally, and come in. Bring the bottle.
Why is making her vomit so wrong here, when it helps with other poisons?
Because this one is corrosive. With something like chocolate, bringing it back up removes material before it is absorbed and that is a net gain. With a corrosive liquid there is nothing to gain and real harm to do: it runs the same damaging substance back over the mouth, throat and food pipe, and a distressed animal may inhale some of it. It is the clearest case in emergency work for not doing it.
How much hot wax does it take to burn a paw?
Less than people expect, because the issue is contact time rather than temperature. Melted candle wax sits comfortably above the temperature at which skin is injured, and wax sticks, so it stays in contact and keeps transferring heat long after a splash of hot water would have run off. That stickiness is also why you should not try to pull it off.
My dog ate a chunk of a scented candle.
Phone us, or your own daytime practice if this is a weekday working hour. Usually it passes and causes nothing worse than a greasy stool, because paraffin is largely inert. What changes the answer is volume, the size of your dog, and whether the wick went down with it. A small dog and a large piece is an obstruction question, and repeated vomiting, no appetite or a tender belly over the next day or two means come in.
Are essential oil diffusers the same problem?
Related but not identical. A plug-in or ultrasonic diffuser does not cause the corrosive injury that liquid potpourri does, and the main concerns there are respiratory irritation and, with certain oils, effects on the liver in cats. The thing the two share is that cats are more sensitive than dogs and that undiluted product on the coat gets groomed off. If your cat has had concentrated oil on them, rinse it off and phone us, or your own daytime practice if we are closed.
The burn looked like nothing on day one and is awful on day three. Did we miss something?
No, that is how burns behave, and it is the most frequently misunderstood thing about them. Tissue that was damaged but not killed outright can die back over the following two or three days, so the wound you see on day three is the true extent of the day-one injury finally becoming visible. It is the reason we would rather look on day one.
What should I keep at home for burns?
Cool running water and nothing else. No creams, no ointments, no oils, no sprays, nothing from a cabinet and nothing meant for people. Anything applied holds heat in, makes the injury harder for us to judge, and gets licked off. Cool water, then come in.
Speak to the team at Mainland Animal Emergency Clinic
If your cat has been in contact with liquid potpourri, or your pet has a burn from wax or a flame, come in. We are open evenings, overnight, and around the clock on Sundays and statutory holidays. During weekday working hours, and on Saturday between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon, phone your own daytime practice and go there rather than waiting for us to open.
Published by the team at Mainland Animal Emergency Clinic.
This article is educational in nature and is not a replacement for hands-on assessment of your own pet by a veterinarian.
Mainland Animal Emergency Clinic
15338 Fraser Highway, Surrey, BC V3R 3P5
Phone: (604) 588-4000
Email: mainlandanimalemerg@gmail.com
Hours: Monday to Friday 5:00 PM to 8:00 AM; Saturday 4:00 PM to 8:00 AM; Sunday and statutory holidays 24 hours