My Lavender Fragrance Was Discontinued and I Found Another Lavender That Smells Almost Identical — Can I Use the Same 8% Formula and Wick?

The eight-step method for any fragrance change

Every page in this part of the series starts from the same event: one fragrance oil in an approved candle has to change, and nothing else should. The oil may have been discontinued by its maker, gone out of stock, become too expensive, or been replaced by a supplier with something they call identical. The questions differ — load, wick, colour, blends, cost, urgency — but the method underneath them is the same, so this hub fixes it once. The sibling pages then take one symptom or one scenario each and go deeper.

Two of those steps do most of the work. The control is what makes the test mean anything: a replacement lavender that throws "well" tells you nothing until it is burned beside the old lavender in the same wax, jar, wick and room. And the matrix is what keeps the job small: most of your earlier test results are about the wax and the jar, and those are still valid because you did not change them. Only the results that depend on the oil need to be re-earned. The full fragrance-retest checklist goes line by line through every test that can depend on the oil; this page shows how to decide which of them you actually run.

Why the same 8% and the same wick are a starting point, not an approval

When you approved your original candle, you did not prove that "lavender at 8%" works. You proved that one specific oil, at 8% of the finished weight, in one wax and one jar, with one wick, gave a clean flame, a full melt pool, an acceptable jar temperature and the throw you wanted. The approval is attached to the whole system. Swap the oil and the approval no longer covers the candle — even if the new oil smells the same in the bottle.

The reason is what a fragrance oil is. A lavender fragrance oil is a blend of many aromatic materials, often in a carrier, built by a perfumer to hit a smell. Two perfumers can hit very similar smells with different materials in different proportions. In general candle-making practice, those differences can change things your nose cannot detect from the bottle: how thick the melted wax-and-oil mixture is, how easily it climbs the wick, how cleanly it burns, how much of the scent leaves the pool when it is hot, and how well the oil stays bound in the wax as it cures. Each of those can move the flame, the melt pool, soot, sweating or throw. They are mechanisms commonly described by candle makers, not measured CSI results — which is exactly why they are tested rather than assumed.

That does not mean the new lavender will behave differently. Often a close replacement lands within the normal spread of your control candles and the change is a formality. The point is that you only know which case you are in after a side-by-side burn. The supplier-change post sets out what a nearly identical scent does and does not prove, and the coffee mushrooming post shows the mechanism in action when a similar-smelling oil changes how the same wick burns.

There is one more thing the bottle cannot tell you: the right load for the new oil. If the replacement is stronger or weaker in wax than the old one, your 8% may now be too much or too little. The confirm stage below tells you whether 8% still matches the control. If it does not, the answer is a load ladder, not a guess — the sandalwood load-ladder post works one through, and the lavender that is stronger in the bottle but weaker in wax shows why the bottle is a poor guide.

The retest matrix: what stays valid when only the lavender changes

Here is every result you would normally hold for an approved candle, marked with the four words this series uses consistently. KEEP means the earlier result is still valid because nothing it depends on changed. CONFIRM means a short side-by-side check against the control. REPEAT means a full retest. NEW means a test or record you never needed before.

Read the matrix from the top. The first two rows cost you nothing, which is the whole benefit of freezing everything but the oil. The middle of the table is where the work is, and almost all of it happens in the same six candles: three new, three control, burned together. The REPEAT lines — throw, sweating and colour — are not extra candles; they are extra observations of the same candles over time. Only the full-life line asks you to keep burning one candle on each side after the first four cycles.

The confirm test, candle by candle

This is the minimum plan for a close replacement: three candles with the new lavender at your existing 8% and existing wick, beside three control candles. At 200 g and 8%, each candle holds 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax, using CSI's convention that load is a share of the finished candle weight. Three new candles need 48 g of new oil net; with a 5% pour allowance — a labelled working assumption — plan 50.4 g. Three candles per side is a working practice, not a standard: it is the smallest number that lets you see whether one odd candle is the oil or just a badly centred wick.

Calendar time is mostly cure and burning, not work. With a 7-day cure checkpoint and one cycle a day, the confirm stage is about eleven days; the full-life pair then runs for as many hours as your candle takes to burn down, which you can estimate from the consumption rate you just measured (usable wax ÷ grams per hour). If a festive deadline makes that too long, the bestseller stock-out post covers what you can release early and what you cannot.

The scoring sheet and the decision rule

Every line on the sheet is scored relative to the control, not against an absolute number. CSI publishes no numeric flame-height or jar-temperature limits and no throw data for any oil, so the only benchmark you have is the candle you already approved — and the candle fire-safety standard and jar-supplier guidance you already work to (ASTM F2417 is a commonly cited US candle fire-safety standard).

The decision rule is simple. If every line is a pass across all four cycles, continue the full-life pair; if that matches too, release the new lavender at 8% with the same wick. If throw differs but every safety line passes, escalate to a load ladder — 7%, 8% and 9% beside the control — and choose the lowest load that matches the control's throw. If a safety line is worse (flame, soot, jar heat, mushrooming), do not buy your way out with more fragrance or accept it for the better scent: escalate to a wick bracket instead, and change only the wick. If a safety line is worse in every cycle, stop and treat the oil as a new fragrance, not a substitute.

The priced test kit

CSI does not sell a fragrance testing kit or sample pack; you build the kit from listed in-stock sizes. Lavender Fragrance Oil is near the top of CSI's best-selling sort and is listed at 15 g (₹105.02), 50 g (₹270.00), 100 g (₹540.00), 500 g (₹2,620.00) and 1 kg (₹5,221.00), all in stock on the 24 September 2026 pull. Most readers already hold the wax, wicks and jars, so the only new spend is the oil; the full kit is priced below for anyone starting from scratch.

If the confirm stage sends you to a load ladder, the 7% and 9% rungs need another 100.8 g with the same allowance — 1 × 100 g + 1 × 15 g for ₹645.02. If it sends you to a wick bracket, a 10-pack of Eco Candle Wicks Thick C2 is ₹94.40; CSI does not publish a wick-size chart or claim any size equivalence, so the bracket is judged purely by the burn against your control. Buy these only when the confirm stage asks for them.

Release and record

A replacement is not finished when the candles pass; it is finished when the next person can reproduce it. Write an approved-material line for the new oil: the product name as listed (Lavender Fragrance Oil), the supplier, the order date and pack, the load (8% of finished weight, 16 g in 200 g), the wick, the wax and bag, and the date and result of the confirm test. Keep a small retained sample of the oil and two retained candles from the first production batch. The same-name reformulation post explains why a retained sample matters even when the name on the bottle never changes.

Then recalculate the candle cost, because the oil price is new. At the 1 kg rate (₹5.22 a gram), the lavender in a 200 g candle at 8% costs ₹83.54; at the 100 g rate (₹5.40) it is ₹86.40; at the 15 g rate it would be ₹112.02. With Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at ₹0.60 a gram, an Eco Thin C1 wick at ₹5.90 and a White Matte jar at ₹70.80, the material cost of one candle is ₹270.45, excluding labour, packaging, freight and GST. Lavender is not one of the oils with a real kilo discount — the 1 kg per-gram price is only about 3.3% below the 100 g — so buying bigger mostly buys stock security. If the new oil costs more or less than the old one and needs a different load, the cost-at-different-loads post compares them properly.

Finally, tell the rest of the business. If your wholesale buyers or stockists were told the candle is unchanged, the honest wording is that the fragrance supplier changed and the candle was re-tested against the previous version. If the scent is detectably different in the blind test and you release it anyway, give it a batch note rather than letting a repeat customer discover it. The 500-empty-jars post covers what to do when production cannot wait for any of this.

Which sibling answers your fragrance change

This page is the hub for the twenty fragrance-change questions in this series. Each sibling takes one situation and adds the one test, table or calculation that situation needs. Find the row closest to yours.

Two pages outside this cluster are worth reading alongside it. If you change only the fragrance supplier sets out which jar and wax data you keep, and why one variable at a time matters explains what goes wrong when the oil and something else change together.

Frequently asked questions