I Want to Standardise One 7 cm Jar Across 10 Fragrances — How Do I Build a Wick-Testing Matrix Without Making Hundreds of Unnecessary Test Candles?

Why the full grid is mostly wasted candles

The obvious way to standardise one jar across ten oils is to test every oil on every wick: 10 oils × 3 CSI rungs × 2 candles = 60 candles. It is thorough, it is fast (everything is poured on day 0) and much of it is wasted. In a single-wick 7 cm jar many oils commonly sit on one wick; for them the grid's other two columns only confirm what the first column already showed. Candles in those cells cost the same as useful ones: about ₹238.66 each for a Lavender candle on C2, ₹271.22 for a Vanilla Bean candle on Cotton Braided (oil at the 100 g price, wax, jar, wick).

An adaptive grid uses the first result to decide the next pour. It relies on one idea that candle makers use every day: a wick that runs over needs a smaller neighbour and a wick that runs under needs a larger one, so a failure tells you which single cell to test next. In the worked example 16 of the 30 cells are never poured.

This post owns the grid for one jar and ten oils. If you have twenty scents and want to cut obvious failures before any full burn, the 20-scent tiered burn plan is the wider method; if you want to flag likely outliers from page data before pouring anything, that is the paper pre-screen.

Stage 1: ten oils on the house wick

Choose the house wick: the rung you expect most of your oils to sit on. At 7 cm with CSI wicks that is usually C1 or C2; we use C2 in the worked example. If you already have one approved oil in this jar, its wick is your house wick. Then pour all ten oils on it, two candles each, in one session from one wax lot and one jar batch. The oils in our example are ten in-stock CSI oils whose pages each state a candle load of up to 10%:

Every oil at the same load: 8% is inside all ten pages' ranges and inside CSI 464's "up to 10%". Changing loads per oil would add a second variable to a wick screen. If an oil's page states a narrower range than your house load, test it at a load inside its range and note that it is not strictly comparable. Whether every scent should share one house load at all is the one-load-for-every-scent question.

In our worked example five oils pass on C2 (Lavender, British Rose, Bergamot Amber, Apple Cinnamon, Woody Oud), three run over (Jasmine, Blue Ocean, Lemongrass and Lime), Vanilla Bean runs under and Roasted Coffee splits. That pattern is illustrative. It follows the common tendency for lighter florals and citrus to burn more easily and for vanillin-rich or heavy gourmand oils to need more wick (Vanilla Bean's page states "Vanillin Content: 2.5%"), but CSI publishes no wick data for any oil, and your ten will sort themselves. A single oil that behaves oddly can be checked against its own four-oil screen method in the four-oil same-wick screen.

Stage 2: only the neighbour a failure points to

Stage 2 uses 120 g of oil and 1,380 g of wax, ₹2,417.05 of materials, and a C1 20-pack and a Cotton Braided 10-pack appear on the shopping list for the first time. Stage-2 outcomes in the example: Blue Ocean and Lemongrass and Lime pass on C1; Vanilla Bean passes on Cotton Braided; Roasted Coffee's repeat passes on C2 (three of its four candles pass); and Jasmine runs under on C1 after running over on C2.

Two more rules keep stage 2 small. If a neighbour fails in the same direction as the house wick (an over oil also runs over on C1), there is no smaller CSI rung; treat it like Jasmine. And if Cotton Braided passes for a heavy oil, remember that its page describes it for candles "exceeding 8 cm": a pass at 7 cm is provisional until the bottom third of a full life agrees. The bottom zone can be screened early with shortcut candles.

Stage 3: full life for the winners

Every winning cell already has two candles that have burned three sessions. They carry on to about 1 cm left. To give each approved oil three full lives, pour one fresh candle per winning cell from the same materials: 9 candles in the example (six on C2, two on C1, one on Cotton Braided), 108 g of oil and 1,242 g of wax. The fresh candle also catches anything that depended on the screen candles' pour day. The calendar for a full life (grams per hour, the stop weight, sessions) is the full-life calendar; here it is enough to know it runs about 12 days from pour to decision.

Three wicks for ten oils in one jar is a normal result, not a failure of standardisation: the jar is standard, the wick follows the oil. How many wick sizes each fragrance needs as a matter of policy, and when to narrow a rung out of the bracket, is the sizes-per-fragrance calculator; how makers group oils into wick families once they have results like these is the behaviour-groups post.

Candles, grams, rupees and days, stage by stage

Stage 1 and 2 oil is priced at each oil's 50 g price; stage 3 includes the 15 g top-up bottles the four "moving" oils need. The full grid's oil is priced at the 100 g price because 72 g of each oil does not fit in a 50 g bottle. Costs are worked examples that exclude labour, freight, packaging and GST. Materials consumed: the adaptive plan uses ₹2,641.55 of oil, ₹2,730.83 of wax, ₹3,681.60 of jars and ₹347.52 of wicks; the full grid ₹3,646.57, ₹4,201.27, ₹5,664.00 and ₹546.80.

Buying the oil without overbuying

An oil that passes first time uses 36 g; one that moves a cell and wins uses 60 g. So buy a 50 g bottle of each and add a 15 g bottle only for the oils stage 1 sends to a neighbour:

Ten 50 g bottles plus four 15 g top-ups cost ₹3,150.94; buying 100 g of each up front would cost ₹5,064.68, ₹1,913.74 more, for oil the adaptive plan doesn't use. Two per-gram quirks worth knowing: Blue Ocean's 50 g is ₹4.94 a gram and its 100 g ₹4.95, so the bigger bottle is fractionally dearer; Apple Cinnamon is ₹4.74 a gram at every size from 50 g to 1 kg. Argued against our own interest: don't buy 500 g of anything until its cell has passed full life.

Days, and Diwali

From a pour on Thursday 1 October, stage 1 decides around day 10, stage 2 around day 20, and the last fresh full-life candles around day 32. Diwali (8 November 2026) is day 38 of that calendar. Oils that passed in stage 1 can go into production after their full lives, in the fourth week; stage-2 oils follow in early November. The full grid would finish around day 22. If Diwali stock matters more than ₹4,657.15, the honest advice is the full grid, or the adaptive plan with the stage-1 winners' fresh candles poured on day 0 as a gamble.

What to buy, and what to skip

Four items that the whole grid shares, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 29 September 2026; the ten oils are in the tables above, each linked. CSI publishes no wick-performance data, so nothing here is ranked on burn results.

Frequently asked questions