How Much Fragrance Oil Is Needed for 1,000 Candles?

16 kg, and how it actually arrives

Load is the share of the finished candle that is fragrance oil, so a 200 g candle at 8% carries 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. Across 1,000 candles that is 16,000 g of oil and 184,000 g of wax. At 10% it is 20 kg and 180 kg; at 13%, 26 kg and 174 kg. Several CSI oil pages state their rate "of total wax weight" instead — on that convention 10% of 184 g of wax is 18.4 g of oil in a 202.4 g candle, or 9.09% of the finished candle — so pick one convention, write it on the batch card, and never mix the two inside a month.

Now the part that is not arithmetic. The largest fragrance-oil pack CSI lists is 1 kg, so 16 kg is sixteen bottles and 26 kg is twenty-six. There is no 5 kg or 10 kg fragrance pack to step down into, which means the listed per-kilo price is what a 16 kg order costs — not a starting point that volume discounts away. If you buy at this level every month, that is exactly the conversation to have on the bulk line: send the scent list and the monthly quantity and ask for a quote. We will not print a figure here for a quantity that is not listed.

The shape of 16 kg

At 500 candles the scent-count question is about range. At 1,000 a month it is about cover — how many weeks of production each bottle buys you, and therefore how often you are in the ordering loop. Assume a steady 250 candles a week.

Eight is the answer because it is the only row where the arithmetic lands on whole bottles with no remainder: 2 kg per scent, two kilo bottles, 125 candles. Every other row leaves you holding part-used 100 g and 500 g bottles, which is fine for a hobbyist and a nuisance in a production room where four people are filling jugs.

Then make it lopsided, because real demand is. The same 16 kg as 2 anchors × 3 kg, 4 workhorses × 2 kg, 2 seasonals × 1 kg is still eight scents and still sixteen bottles, but it matches where the sales are and it gives the two anchors six weeks of cover instead of four. That extra cover on the fast lines is worth more than an even split's tidiness, because the fast lines are the ones that will embarrass you by running out mid-week.

Cadence, cover and cash

A CSI oil costs the same per gram whether you buy one bottle or sixteen — the ladder steps by size, not by order value. That is unusually clarifying: it means splitting the order is free at list price, and the decision is only about exposure against admin.

The reorder point is the part worth writing on a wall. At 250 candles a week and eight scents, each scent consumes 500 g a week. So a full 2 kg allocation is four weeks; one remaining kilo is two weeks; 500 g is one week. Set the trigger at 1 kg remaining per scent and you are ordering with a fortnight of cover in hand, which absorbs an out-of-stock line or a delay without stopping the pour. Waiting until 500 g remains leaves you one week — enough only if nothing goes wrong, and something goes wrong roughly monthly.

A bottle change every 62 candles

Here is the cost of scale that no price list shows. One kilo of oil at 16 g a candle is 62 candles. Sixteen kilos is therefore sixteen bottle openings across the month, and every bottle change is a point where something can differ — the dose, the add temperature, the stirring time, the operator, or the bottle itself.

That is not an argument against scale; it is an argument for a protocol. Three habits carry almost all of the benefit. Weigh, never pour by eye or by volume — no CSI page publishes a specific gravity for any oil, so millilitres cannot be converted to grams reliably, and 2 g of error on a 16 g dose is a whole percentage point of load on a 200 g candle. Sample each new bottle before it goes into production: one jar, poured at your standard recipe, cured alongside a retained jar from the previous bottle. And change one thing at a time, so that when a batch is better or worse you know which change owned the difference. The full protocol, including the record sheet, is in the batch-consistency guide.

The second consistency question at this volume is the wax, not the oil. Sixteen kilos of fragrance goes into 184 kg of wax, which is eighteen or more packs, and a wax change mid-month will alter your throw faster than any oil variation. Keep the wax constant across a run, work to its stated load ceiling — up to 13% on Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, up to 10% on CSI 464, up to 13% on Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 — and if you must switch wax, re-test the wick before the switch reaches production, because a different wax is a different melt pool.

An eight-scent portfolio at 1,000 candles

A worked example, not a prescription: eight in-stock oils spanning families and price tiers, 2 kg of each, ₹82,698 in total. Three are shown in detail below because they illustrate the three things that matter at this volume — a documented anchor, a low-cost workhorse, and an oil whose page gives you a temperature to respect.

Note what the last column does for you: all eight pages state a candle load that accommodates 8%, so one load, one recipe and one dose apply across the whole month. That is worth engineering deliberately. A portfolio where one oil wants 6% and another 11% means two recipes, two dose cards and two chances of a mix-up on a busy afternoon — and the wax's own ceiling still caps both.

What breaks first at this volume

Four failure modes account for most of the trouble at a thousand candles a month, and none of them is running out of oil in absolute terms.

Frequently asked questions