The premise of these parties is simple: you get your friends together to look at candles/sex toys/food, then they all feel obligated to buy stuff from you. In return for you hosting the party, you get some crappy little gift item that probably costs the company 25 cents and a certain amount of credit toward their merchandise.

I don't know how the sex toy racket works (my friend Crystal does it and she's a smart cookie so I assume it's different, and even if it's not you can have too many candles but you can't have too many big black dildos. At least that's what my mom always says), but I can testify that these candle parties are a huge fucking rip off. HUGE. Ginormous, even.