My Lavender Candle Burns Perfectly but Vanilla Tunnels in the Exact Same Jar and Wax — Can the Fragrance Require a Different Wick?

The vanilla-only order

The worked example is the cluster's jar: your own 200 g jar about 8.0 cm across the inside (50.27 cm² of pool), CSI 464, 8% of total weight (16 g oil + 184 g wax per candle). Lavender passed a full-life burn on Eco C2. Dark Vanilla, poured the same way, leaves a ring of wax on the glass. The purchase is the rung above C2 and enough vanilla for three candles on it. Nothing else.

The order is ₹530.00, or ₹1,037.40 if you need the wax. Why three vanilla candles and not one: one candle can tunnel or run hot for reasons that have nothing to do with the wick (an off-centre tab, a draught, an air pocket), and the approval standard this series uses is three candles through the full life. Why no C2 vanilla candles: you already have them. The candles that tunnelled are the fail below the new rung; keep their notes. If you poured only one vanilla candle on C2, read the next section before you order.

Why the 8% stays fixed: 8% of total weight is 8.70% of the wax weight, inside both the Dark Vanilla page's "candles (6-10%)" and CSI 464's "Fragrance Load Up to 10%" on either reading. Changing the load and the wick in the same candles would leave you unable to say which one fixed the tunnel.

Before you buy: make sure it is the fragrance

"Exact same jar and wax" is the claim to check. The cheapest purchase is the one you don't make because the tunnel came from somewhere else. Five questions, none of which costs anything:

If all five are "yes", the oil is the variable, and the tendency gives you a direction: heavier and vanillin-rich oils are commonly linked to a smaller flame on the same wick, so the test rung is above C2, not below. The full method for bracketing a heavy and a light oil around their own centres (lavender on C1 and C2, vanilla on C2 and Cotton Braided) is the offset-bracket post; this page owns only the vanilla purchase that follows from it.

A rough timing check also helps. A very rough rule of thumb puts a first burn to the edge at about one hour per 2.5 cm of width: about 3.2 hours for 8 cm, inside the commonly quoted 3–4 hours for a full first pool. A vanilla candle still well short of the glass at four hours, on burn 3, with the lavender reaching it, is the signal this page is written for.

Three Cotton Braided candles: grams, wax, rupees

Each figure excludes your jar, labour, freight, packaging and GST. A vanilla candle on Cotton Braided costs ₹236.56; on C2, ₹234.00. The wick is the smallest line in either. What the test really spends is three candles of vanilla and wax, and that is the argument for running it properly once rather than twice.

What the three candles can tell you

The middle case deserves honesty. CSI's sized, tabbed rungs are C1, C2 and Cotton Braided, and the jump from C2 to Cotton Braided is large. A pair of C1 wicks spread across an 8 cm pool is the in-between option we can sell, at ₹11.80 a candle against ₹12.00 for one Cotton Braided; how far apart to set a pair is geometry for the 8.5 cm double-arm post. A different vanilla is the other route: Vanilla Bean states "Vanillin Content: 2.5%" and Dark Vanilla only "Vanillin present", but neither figure predicts the wick, which is why that comparison is its own test. If neither works, we would rather say so than sell you a fourth wick that does not exist in our range.

Does Cotton Braided become a stocked wick?

Once vanilla passes on Cotton Braided, you run two wicks in one jar: C2 for lavender, Cotton Braided for vanilla. Because CSI prices both flat per wick, the second SKU costs nothing extra per wick in small packs. What it does cost is the price step on every vanilla candle, a second bin to count, and a second safety stock. The step scales with vanilla volume alone:

Put the step in proportion. At production prices, 16 g of Dark Vanilla costs ₹122.34 and 16 g of Lavender ₹83.54: a vanilla candle already carries ₹38.80 more oil than a lavender one. The wick step adds ₹2.56, about 6.6% of that oil gap. If vanilla is worth selling at its oil cost, the wick will not change the decision. Price the vanilla candle with its own wick in its own cost line.

When to stock it, and when to buy per batch

Our judgement, labelled: if vanilla is a regular monthly line, make Cotton Braided a stocked SKU with its own reorder point. If vanilla is seasonal (a Diwali batch, a wedding order), skip the shelf: buy the batch count plus a small allowance after approval. A 40-candle batch with 5% is 42 wicks: the 50-pack (₹600.00) or five 10-packs (₹600.00), the same price either way, so take the 50 if the extra wicks will be used by the next batch.

Two wicks, one jar: the production order

Wicks of a size = candles of the oils on that size × wicks per candle × (1 + allowance). In the worked example you sell 140 lavender and 60 vanilla candles a month, with a 5% allowance for rejects and retests (our figure):

A reorder point is daily use × your lead time + safety stock. 63 Cotton Braided a month is about 2.1 a day; with a 10-day order-to-bench time (your figure; CSI publishes no lead times, so confirm dispatch on WhatsApp) and a week of safety stock (15 wicks), reorder when you are down to 36. Fifteen wicks of safety stock is ₹180.00 sitting on a shelf: small money, and the reason a cheap wick deserves generous cover once approved. Per-size reorder points across several wicks are the reorder-point post; splitting quantities by sales mix in detail is the two-wick quantity post.

One last check before the big order: the approval belongs to Dark Vanilla in this jar, CSI 464 and 8%. A different vanilla, a new jar batch, a move to 10%, or a new wick supplier each send vanilla back for at least a confirm test (replacement wicks across fragrance types). The oud family has its own version of this decision: can one up-rung serve every oud?.

What to buy for the vanilla rung, and what to skip

Five items, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 1 October 2026. CSI publishes no wick-performance data for any oil, so nothing is ranked on burn results. Candle counts use 16 g per 200 g candle and 12 g per 150 g candle.

Skip for this test: the C1 20-pack, unless Cotton Braided runs hot. Performance Wooden Wicks (₹590.00 for 10): one listing with no widths, a different construction, a different test. Eco Braided Wicks and the Braided Wick Roll: unsized, cut to length; an experiment for later, not a rung. Any 100-pack of Cotton Braided before full life.

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