I'm Choosing Between 8% and 10% Fragrance Load — How Much Does That Decision Change My Cost on a 100 g, 200 g and 300 g Candle?

Stop arguing in percentages: the decision is grams

The reason an 8%-versus-10% argument goes in circles is that percentages hide their base. A percentage point is not a quantity until you say a percentage of what, and in candle making the answer is settled: fragrance load is a percentage of wax weight. That is how CSI product pages state it — the Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 page gives a maximum of 10% of total wax weight, and the Pink Crush page gives 8–10% in soy wax — and it is the convention this page uses throughout. Once the base is wax, the conversion is trivial: 1% of wax weight is 1 g of oil per 100 g of wax, so two percentage points is 2 g per 100 g, and every figure below follows.

Work the three sizes in your question and the pattern is immediate. A 100 g pour of wax takes 8 g of oil at 8% and 10 g at 10%: 2 g of difference. A 200 g pour takes 16 g or 20 g: 4 g. A 300 g pour takes 24 g or 30 g: 6 g. Nothing else in the recipe changes. The wax weight is fixed by the size you chose, the vessel is the same vessel, the wick is the same wick, and the label, the box and the courier do not know what load you poured. The decision is a fragrance-only decision, which is exactly why it can be costed in one line rather than by rebuilding the whole cost sheet twice.

It also means the fill weight moves, and moves differently at each size. At 8% a 200 g pour of wax puts 216 g into the vessel; at 10% it puts 220 g in. On a 300 g pour that is 324 g against 330 g. If your vessel is already close to full at 8%, the extra load is not a costing question at all — it is a physical one, and the answer is to reduce the wax weight rather than overfill. That variant is costed in its own table further down, because the two readings of a candle size give different answers and the difference is worth money.

The nine cells: three sizes, two loads, one delta each

Here is the grid, priced on materials in stock in September 2026. The wax is Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 at ₹507.40 a kilogram in the 1 kg pack; the fragrance is Pink Crush at ₹8.90 a gram at the 1 kg pack. The vessel is deliberately absent — three candle sizes need three different vessels, CSI publishes a fill weight for almost none of them, and a vessel price would be the same under both loads anyway, so it would cancel out of every delta in the last column. The wick is shown separately for the same reason.

Read the last column first. ₹17.80, ₹35.60, ₹53.39 — a clean three-to-one span from the smallest candle to the largest, because the decision scales with wax weight and nothing else does. Then read the two total columns and notice how small the delta is against them: on a 200 g candle, ₹35.60 of fragrance sits on top of ₹243.86 of scented wax, which is a rise of about one part in seven. That is material at volume and invisible at the level of a single candle, and both of those facts matter when you decide.

Add the wick and you have a complete material line for a candle whose vessel you will price yourself. With an Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) at ₹5.90 each at the 100 pack rate, the 200 g candle is ₹249.76 at 8% and ₹285.36 at 10%; the 300 g candle is ₹371.70 and ₹425.09. A larger candle usually needs a larger or a second wick, which is a real cost this table cannot guess for you — size it by burn test and use the wick guide by diameter as the starting point rather than a rule.

Why the same decision costs three times as much on your 300 g candle

This sounds obvious written down and is routinely missed in practice, because makers hold the load in their head as a property of the recipe rather than of the batch. A recipe card that says 10% reads the same whether you are pouring votives or 300 g jars, so the decision feels identical at every size. It is not. At 100 g of wax the two points cost ₹17.80; at 300 g they cost ₹53.39, and the ratio is exactly 3 to 1 because 300 is exactly three times 100. Nothing else in the candle behaves this way: the wick does not triple, the label does not triple, and the vessel price is a step function rather than a multiplier.

There is a second, quieter consequence. Because the fragrance line grows with wax weight and the fixed lines do not, fragrance is a larger share of a big candle than of a small one. On this pairing, 16 g of oil at 8% is ₹142.38 against ₹101.48 of wax — already more than the wax. On the 300 g candle at 10% the oil is ₹266.97 against ₹152.22 of wax, which is close to two to one. If you sell a range that runs from votives to 300 g jars, your large format is a fragrance business with a wax accessory, and it is the format where an oil price rise hurts first.

The per-gram view says the same thing in a form you can carry between sizes. At 8% the scented wax costs ₹1.13 a gram of what goes into the vessel; at 10% it costs ₹1.27 a gram. That step of ₹0.14 a gram is size-independent — it is a property of the mixture, not of the candle — so you can price any size you like by multiplying. A 250 g pour at 8% holds 270 g of scented wax and costs ₹304.83; the same pour at 10% holds 275 g and costs ₹349.33. Keep one rate per recipe, labelled with its load, and recompute it only when a price or a load changes.

What the two stated figures say about 10%

Before you spend ₹53.39 a candle, read what the two product pages actually state. The Pink Crush page states 8–10% in soy wax. The Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 page states a maximum of 10% of total wax weight. Where a wax grade's stated maximum and an oil page's stated range differ, the lower of the two governs; here they agree, so 10% is the ceiling on this pairing and 8% is the bottom of the oil's own recommended band. You are choosing between the two ends of a narrow window, not between a safe figure and an ambitious one.

That matters for two practical reasons. First, there is no headroom: if 10% does not give you the throw you want, more oil is not the next move on this pairing — the next moves are cure time, wick size and vessel diameter. Second, a candle poured at the very top of a stated range has the least tolerance for a weighing error. Two grams over on a 100 g pour takes you from 10% to 12%, which is outside both stated figures; the same two grams on a 300 g pour is a rounding error. Small candles at the ceiling need a scale that reads to 0.1 g, and the wax you buy is not the variable at fault when that goes wrong.

These are the wax manufacturer's stated formulation maximums and the oil page's stated candle usage range, not a rule imposed from outside, and MSDS and IFRA documentation is available on request through WhatsApp. The Pink Crush page also notes a vanilla sugar base that may cause slight yellowing, which is cosmetic rather than a performance problem, and is worth knowing before you pour it into a white or undyed wax at the top of the range. For what the load decision looks like from the throw side rather than the cost side, the safe fragrance load guide covers the mechanism in detail.

The same decision at batch scale, and what it buys in packs

The arithmetic in the last row is worth pausing on because you can check it without a calculator. Five hundred candles of 200 g at two extra percentage points is 500 × 4 g, which is 2,000 g — two 1 kg packs of Pink Crush at ₹8,899.00 each, or ₹17,798.00. That is the clearest way to hold the decision in mind at production scale: at 200 g a side, every 250 candles you pour at 10% instead of 8% consumes one extra kilogram of fragrance oil. On a 300 g candle it is one extra kilogram every 167 candles; on a 100 g candle, one every 500.

One thing the pack ladder will not do for you here is soften the blow. On Pink Crush the rate per gram is close to identical across the range: 4 g of oil — the decision on a 200 g candle — is ₹35.52 at the 50 g pack, ₹35.96 at 100 g, ₹35.59 at 500 g and ₹35.60 at 1 kg. The whole spread across the ladder is ₹0.44 on the 200 g candle. Most CSI waxes and oils are priced at the same rate per kilogram or per gram at every pack size, so the reason to buy a larger pack is fewer parcels and fewer stock-outs, not a lower rate. For a large consignment, ask on WhatsApp rather than assuming the ladder falls.

If your 200 g is the finished candle, not the wax

Everything above reads "100 g, 200 g and 300 g candle" as the weight of wax you pour, which is the series convention and matches how loads are stated. Plenty of makers mean the other thing: the finished candle, wax and oil together, weighs 200 g. That reading does not change the load — it is still a true percentage of wax weight — but it changes how many grams of each you buy, because the oil has to fit inside the 200 g rather than sit on top of it.

The division is the small piece of algebra that catches people out. Fill equals wax plus the load of wax, so at 8% the fill is 1.08 lots of wax and the wax is 200 ÷ 1.08 = 185.19 g, with 14.81 g of oil. At 10% the fill is 1.10 lots of wax, so the wax is 200 ÷ 1.10 = 181.82 g with 18.18 g of oil. Subtracting 10% from 200 g gives 180 g and 20 g, which is an 11.1% load and is the commonest arithmetic mistake in candle costing.

This page carries the wax-weight reading throughout. Every figure in the nine-cell table, the batch table and the diagram is 100 g, 200 g or 300 g of wax, with the oil on top. If your vessel is the constraint — and for most container candles it is — measure it rather than assume it: fill the vessel with water to the line you intend to pour to, weigh the water, and multiply by about 0.9 to get the soy wax weight that vessel takes. That is general candle-making practice and it is the only honest way to get a fill figure, because CSI publishes a fill weight for very few vessels.

Doing it on your own oil, in four steps

One last piece of arithmetic worth keeping. At 8% on this pairing, one gram of scented wax costs ₹1.13, so a weighing slip of ten grams either way on a 200 g pour is ₹11.29 — about a third of the entire load decision. Buy the scale before you buy the extra two percentage points. A consistent pour weight improves your costing and your burn quality at the same time, which is more than the load choice can claim.

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