I Changed Only My Fragrance Supplier but the Scent Profile Is Nearly Identical — Do I Still Need a New Burn Test?

Why a new supplier means a new burn test

The question sounds like it should have a no for an answer. The scent is nearly identical, the wax is the same, the jar and the wick are the same; the only thing that changed is where the bottle came from. But "where the bottle came from" is not a paperwork detail. Two suppliers selling "jasmine" are selling two different formulations, built from different materials, in different proportions, possibly on different carriers. The fact that your nose finds them nearly identical says the two perfumers aimed at the same smell and hit it. It says nothing about how the rest of the mixture behaves once it is 8% of a melted pool with a flame on top.

In general candle-making practice, a fragrance oil's composition can influence how thick the melted pool is, how readily it wicks up, how much carbon builds on the wick, how the scent releases from a hot pool, and how well the oil stays bound in the wax during storage. Those are commonly described mechanisms, not measured differences between any two oils — CSI publishes no burn or throw data for its oils. They are the reason the burn test exists. The fragrance-change hub lists every result they can touch; this page is about how much of that you need to re-prove when the scent itself is not in question.

The honest answer is yes, a new burn test — but a confirm test, not a development test. When you first built the candle you were searching: loads, wicks, maybe waxes. Now you are checking one thing: does the new oil sit inside the behaviour you already approved? That takes six candles and about four burn cycles, not the dozens of candles a first formulation takes.

What each kind of evidence proves

It helps to lay out exactly what each check tells you, because most makers stop too early — usually after the bottle sniff or the first burn. The table climbs from the cheapest evidence to the most expensive. The first three rows are about scent; the last three are about the candle as a burning system.

Notice the last column. After the bottle, every step uses the same six candles. The cost of climbing the whole ladder is almost entirely time, not material. That is the practical case against skipping the burn: you have already made the candles to check cold throw; burning them beside the control costs nothing extra except attention.

The retest matrix for a supplier-only change

Sort your existing results by what they depend on. Anything that depends only on the wax, jar or process stays. Anything that depends on the oil gets re-earned, at the lightest level that will catch a difference.

The right-hand column is the point of the table. A new supplier can hand you documents and a price. It cannot hand you your candle's behaviour, because it has never burned your candle. The "direct replacement" post goes further into what a supplier's claim covers; the fragrance-supplier-only page lists the jar and wax data you can carry across.

Settle the scent first: the blind triangle test

A triangle test is the simplest honest way to ask whether two scents are distinguishable. Put three cold, cured candles in front of a sniffer — two with one oil, one with the other — with the labels underneath. Ask only one question: which one is the odd one out? A person who cannot tell the difference still gets it right one time in three by guessing. So a single correct answer means nothing; the question is how often they are right over several trials.

Those percentages are plain probability, not candle data: with a one-in-three chance per trial, guessing reaches four or more out of six only 10.0% of the time and five or more only 1.8%. Use two or three sniffers, swap which oil is the odd one each trial, and air the room between rounds. If the scent is not distinguishable, you have evidence for "nearly identical" that is better than one person's impression. If it is, you have learned that before spending a week burning candles.

The confirm burn: six candles, three tiers

The example candle in this post is a 180 g fill in a 200 ml Salsa jar — an illustrative fill, since CSI does not publish that jar's fill weight; weigh your own. At 8% of the finished weight each candle holds 14.4 g of oil and 165.6 g of wax. The wax is Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464, rated up to 10% fragrance load by the wax maker, with CSI's own guidance of 80–90°C for melt and pour (confirm on the product page). The wick is whatever you approved — here, Cotton Braided Wicks.

That is the whole difference between a confirm test and a development test. A development test would start with a ladder of loads and wicks. A confirm test starts at the approved point and only moves if the control says it must. Most supplier changes of a closely matched oil end at Tier B; the ones that do not are exactly the ones you needed to catch.

The priced kit and the price that caused the change

Many supplier changes start with price, so it is worth being precise about what the new oil really costs. Jasmine Fragrance Oil is listed at ₹103.00 for 15 g, ₹230.00 for 50 g, ₹430.00 for 100 g, ₹1,961.00 for 500 g and ₹3,923.00 for 1 kg, all in stock on the 24 September 2026 pull. Jasmine is one of the minority of CSI oils with a real kilo step: the 1 kg per-gram price is 8.8% below the 100 g. Most oils in the collection do not have one — for 52 of 91 oils the kilo is within ±1% of the 100 g rate.

Compare those figures with your old supplier's price per gram at the pack you actually buy, multiplied by the same 14.4 g. If the new oil passes the confirm test at 8%, that comparison is the whole economic case. If it only matches the control at a different load, compare cost per candle at each oil's own load, not price per kilo — the ₹5,000 vs ₹3,500 per kg post works that comparison.

Decision rule, release and record

Pass when the triangle test shows no reliable difference (or a difference you accept as a product decision), every burn line sits within the spread of the control candles over four cycles, the full-life pair ends the same way, and the stored candles look and feel like the controls at each checkpoint. Escalate when throw differs but every safety line passes — change the load only. Stop when flame, soot, mushrooming or jar heat is worse than the control in every cycle; that oil is a new fragrance in your system and needs its own development work, starting with a wick bracket.

On release, update the approved-material record: oil name exactly as listed, supplier, order date and pack size, load, wick, wax, the triangle-test result and the confirm-test date. Keep a retained sample of the first lot you buy and two retained candles from the first production batch. If you plan to keep both suppliers approved as a backup for each other, the backup-supplier post shows how to pre-qualify the second one before a stock-out forces it, and the same-name reformulation post covers what to check when the next lot of the same oil arrives.

One last honest note. A confirm test is proportionate because the change is small, but it is not free of judgement. If the old oil was a bestseller, a blind scent difference that your testers can detect is a real product change, even if every burn line passes. Decide whether customers are buying the same candle — and if they are not, tell them.

Frequently asked questions