I Can Afford Only Five 1 Kg Fragrance Oils for My First Candle Collection — Which Fragrance Families Give Me the Widest Product Range Without Creating Too Much Dead Stock?

What nobody can tell you about your five

Start here, because it saves you from the most expensive kind of advice. There is no published figure for what Indian candle buyers prefer by scent family, no regional breakdown, and nothing in CSI's product data that could produce one. Any page that tells you florals outsell gourmands, or that a particular oil is a proven seller, is guessing with confidence. The guess might even be right — but you will pay for it in kilos.

So this guide answers a narrower question honestly instead of a wider one badly. The narrow question is: given five slots, how do I make sure I am not buying the same candle five times? That one has a real answer, because CSI publishes the note structure of most of its oils. Two oils that both list vanilla and caramel in the base will read as cousins in a melt pool no matter what the labels say. Two oils whose published tiers have no material in common will not. Range coverage is checkable; demand is not.

The second thing nobody can tell you is how fast you will sell. That is why every number in this guide is expressed per candle and per month of cover rather than per kilo — so you can put your own volume into it and see when a kilo becomes a liability. A kilo of oil is roughly 67 candles at 14.8 g. Sell eight candles a month in that scent and the kilo is eight and a half months of stock. Sell two, and it is nearly three years.

One more honest note on the money. CSI's largest listed fragrance pack is 1 kg. There is no 5 kg or 10 kg fragrance pack on the store, so "five kilos" genuinely means five separate 1 kg bottles. Anything beyond the listed packs is a quote on WhatsApp, and this guide will not invent what that quote says. The listed per-kilo prices are the ceiling you can plan against today.

The five slots, side by side

Here are the five families with one in-stock CSI oil in each, set out with what the product page actually states: the scent family in the page's own words, the published notes or profile, the stated soy load, the vanillin or discolouration position, and the flash point where the page gives a measured one. The last column is the fragrance cost inside one 200 g candle at 8% of a 185 g wax fill — 14.8 g of oil.

Two things are worth noticing before you choose. First, the stated ceiling is 10% of wax weight on four of the five and a 6–10% band on Citrus Lemon — so the shortlist does not force you to run different loads per scent, which keeps a first collection simple. Always take the lower of the two ceilings in front of you: the wax page's range and the oil page's range. Second, only one of the five carries a discolouration warning. Vanilla Bean's page states 2.5% vanillin and tells you to test in lighter waxes, which is a real production constraint if your jars are white or your wax is pale. The other four state 0% or approximately 0%. If you planned a white-wax collection, that single fact is more useful than any opinion about which family is fashionable — and it is covered in depth in which candle fragrances are least likely to discolour white wax.

Where two oils secretly collide

This is the section that justifies the shortlist, and it is the only honest substitute for a demand claim. Lay the published note pyramids side by side and count the materials that appear in more than one. Across the five slots above, the count is zero — no material named on one page is named on another. That is what makes them five products rather than one product with five labels.

Now do the same exercise with five oils a first-time buyer might reasonably pick on instinct, and watch the overlap appear. None of these are bad oils; several are excellent. The point is that their published pyramids tell you they are standing in slots you have already filled.

Run the same audit on any oil you are tempted by. Three questions, all answerable from the product page: what family does the page name, what materials does it list in the base, and does any of those materials appear on another page in my basket? If the answer to the third is yes, you are buying a variation, not a slot. Variations are a fine thing to own once you know which slot sells — they are an expensive thing to own at the start.

One kilo per slot

Five cards, one per family. Each shows every listed pack size, the price per kilo at that pack, and how many 14.8 g candles the pack covers — so you can decide slot by slot whether to commit the kilo or start at 500 g. Watch the per-kilo column: it moves differently on every oil, and on two of these five the smaller pack is not materially dearer.

Cost per candle and months of cover

Now the part that decides whether five kilos is a range or a warehouse. Two numbers matter: what the oil costs inside one candle, and how long a kilo lasts at your volume. The first is fixed by the price. The second is fixed by you, which is why the table below asks you to pick a column rather than handing you an answer.

Read the five-slot basket through that table and the honest conclusion is uneven. If your total output is 40 candles a month across five scents, that is eight candles per scent, and every one of your five kilos is more than eight months of cover. The oil is not spoiling on any published figure — no CSI oil page states a shelf life, and this guide will not invent one — but your cash is sitting in bottles instead of in jars, wax and wicks. At 125 candles a month the same five kilos are under three months of cover and the kilo is clearly the right pack.

That bottom row is the most useful number in this guide. Buying five kilos instead of five 500 g packs costs you ₹11,109.40 more today and saves you ₹277 in total — about 85 paise per candle on the first 338 candles. It is not a volume discount; it is a convenience purchase. And the direction of travel is not always even that kind: on Sage and Cedarwood the kilo is ₹6,867.60 against ₹5,168.40 for two 500 g packs — the bigger pack is ₹1,699.20 worse. Never assume the ladder rewards volume on this store. Check it per oil, in the pack table on the product page, before you commit.

The dead-stock arithmetic

Dead stock is not a feeling, it is a figure: the rupees sitting in a bottle you are not pouring. With five kilos at ₹22,495.80, the average slot holds ₹4,499.16. If one slot in five turns out to be a scent your customers walk past, that is what is stranded — unless the slot you got wrong is the gourmand, in which case it is ₹7,646. Stranded oil is still usable, which is the saving grace; it is simply usable slowly.

What these five do not cover

Five slots cover five families. CSI lists over a hundred fragrance oils, so by definition the five above leave whole territories empty — and you should know which, because the gap is where your sixth and seventh purchases belong once you have sales data. Here is what the basket deliberately does not reach.

Notice what that table is not doing: it is not ranking those six families by how well they will sell, because that is unknowable from here. It is telling you which parts of the map your five kilos leave blank, and roughly what the next pin costs per candle. When your own sell-through gives one slot a clear lead, the sensible sixth purchase is usually the family furthest from the slot that is working — because that is the one that adds a reason to buy a second candle. The family-by-family detail is in which fragrance families perform best in coconut-soy wax.

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