What Information Should Be Written into My Master Candle Formula So Purchasing Cannot Accidentally Order the Wrong Wick?

The mix-up, made precise

The worked example, labelled. You make a five-formula range. MF-02 is a 200 g Woody Oud candle at 8% (16 g of oil and 184 g of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464, load as a percentage of total weight) in your own 8 cm jar. It used to run on Eco Thick (C2), and by hour three of a four-hour session the flame stood well above the 2.5–5 cm band many makers use as a rule of thumb, the jar rim blackened and the wick carried a mushroom. You trimmed to 5–6 mm, moved the test away from the ceiling fan, and it still sooted. So you stepped down to Eco Thin (C1), ran three candles to the floor, and C1 passed in every third. MF-02 has been on C1 for three months.

Then the reorder. The purchase note read "Eco wicks 500". The last Eco order on file had been for MF-03, which runs on C2, so the 500-pack of Thick (C2) went into the basket (₹4,720.00 rather than ₹2,950.00 for Thin (C1)). Nobody opened the pack against the formula. A 120-candle MF-02 batch was wicked with C2, and the first customer burns came back with the old story: tall flame, soot on the rim by the third hour. Materials in that batch, excluding jars, were ₹21,036.10 (₹175.30 a candle). The wick price difference was ₹1,770.00. The batch cost about 11.9 times what the wrong pack did.

Nothing about the wick failed. The wick was a good C2, doing exactly what C2 does in that candle. What failed was that the formula said "Eco wick" and the order inherited the last person's habit. This post is about the wick block that stops that. The physical sample those fields point to is 6995; the specification you send a supplier for a 5,000-piece order is 6993.

Where a wrong wick gets in: causes, ranked

When an approved formula suddenly flames tall or soots, the wrong wick is one cause among several. The ranking is our judgement for a formula that has passed a full-life test and then changes behaviour between batches; signs are common observations, not CSI data. The first two rows are about how the customer burns the candle; the rest are about what went into it.

Rows 1 and 2 are why you don't panic at the first complaint: a candle from the batch, burned the way your label says, settles it in one session. Rows 3 to 5 are what the master formula can prevent. Row 6 has its own method and row 7 is change control (6988). If you burn a suspect retain to check row 3, the measurements are the ones you approved with: flame height at hours 1–4, pool depth, mushroom size, a white card held above the flame, and grams burned per hour.

The wick block of a master formula

The master formula covers wax, oil, load, dye, jar, temperatures and cure; the general case for an approved raw-material specification is the published post on approved raw-material specifications. Here is only the wick block, filled in for MF-02. The "source" column matters: some lines come from the supplier's page, most come from your own measurements and tests, and none should come from memory.

Field 2 is the one that failed, and it needs a negative as well as a positive: "Thin (C1). Not Thick (C2)." The negative looks fussy until you remember that MF-02 used to be C2, so every old note, batch sheet and spare in a drawer says C2. Field 11 records that history so the next person doesn't "correct" the formula back to the wick that sooted.

Field 6 exists because our page is silent. In the text we captured, the Eco wick listing gives no length, width or tab size. So the formula records yours: the median length of ten wicks from the approved pack, the tab height, and the trimmed length at first light. The Cotton Braided page does state "Height of the wick is 10.16 cm"; MF-05's block records that figure and your own measurement beside it. How to measure a wick against a retained sample is 6994; this field just keeps the numbers where purchasing and goods-in can see them.

Field 10 stops a quiet mistake. A wick approval belongs to one candle: this oil at this load, this wax, this jar, this dye. If someone launches a 10% version of MF-02, or a black one, field 10 says the C1 approval doesn't cover it. Per-fragrance wick specs are normal (6987); this field makes sure each one stays attached to the formula it was tested in. For organising those results across a whole range, see the published post on building your own internal wick guide.

The purchase line, and what happens when a variant is out

The master formula is for whoever develops and approves candles. Purchasing needs one line per wick, generated from it, which they paste into the order or the WhatsApp message unchanged:

Three details in those lines are deliberate. "Any pack": C1, C2 and Cotton Braided cost the same per wick at every pack (₹5.90, ₹9.44, ₹12.00), so the pack is a cash decision, never part of the spec. Argued against our own interest: a formula that says "1,000-pack" invites someone to buy a 1,000-pack because the formula says so. "MF-04 × 2": the two-wick SKU is counted per wick, not per candle; ordered as single, it comes up 60 wicks short, and a short order is how a rushed substitute happens. "No substitutes": the line tells the supplier, not just your staff. How much to hold and when to reorder are 6999.

When the variant is out of stock, the master formula has already decided: stop and ask. It does not say "buy the nearest". On 7 October 2026 the Eco C1 10-pack is out of stock, which changes nothing for MF-02 because a 20-pack covers the same need; but if Thin (C1) were out entirely, the nearest CSI wick is Thick (C2), which is the wick MF-02 was moved off for soot. CSI's sized, tabbed range is short: C1, then C2, then Cotton Braided, with nothing in between and one wooden width. So there's rarely a "close enough" wick to reach for, which is exactly why the formula should forbid reaching. Ask us on WhatsApp when the variant will be back. We'd rather lose that sale than sell you the wick your formula was changed to avoid.

Alternates: none until a test says so

The safest entry in field 8 is "None approved". If you want a fallback written in, for a variant that keeps going out of stock or a second supplier, it earns its place the same way the first wick did: a controlled burn against the approved wick, in the exact production formula, to the floor. Worked example, labelled: qualifying a cut-to-length option from the Braided Wick Roll with 100 wick tabs (61 meters) as an MF-02 alternate, cut to 12 cm per wick. The roll's page states no braid size, so the alternate's spec would be "this roll, cut to 12 cm, on its own tab", and the approval would cover nothing else.

Three candles per arm is the series minimum; for a formula that has already failed once on soot, a second pour date makes the approval much stronger (how many replicates). Approval itself is about the wick being right; the master formula is about making sure the right one keeps arriving.

The CSI wick buy list and the step to production

If the alternate is a supplier's wick rather than ours, swap the roll for their sample; the rest of the list holds. Argued against our own interest: most small makers don't need an alternate at all. If the approved variant goes out of stock, waiting a week or asking us on WhatsApp is cheaper than ₹2,045.34 of testing, and cheaper still than a wrong batch. Write "None approved" and keep a little more safety stock instead (pooled stock for a wick several formulas share is 6997).

The production step is the purchase-line table above: each formula's wick field, multiplied by its monthly candles and wicks per candle, plus a labelled allowance, rounded up to whole CSI packs. Because every line names a variant and says "no substitutes", the person placing the order needs no judgement at all, which is the point. Goods-in then opens each pack, checks the variant wording against the line, writes the receipt date on the pack, measures ten wicks against field 6 and only then moves the pack to the bin labelled for its formulas. The whole method, from first soot to this order, is the series playbook.

What to buy, and what to skip

Four products that appear in the worked example's wick blocks, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 7 October 2026. CSI publishes no burn or soot data for any wick, so none is ranked on performance, and each card says when not to buy.

Skip for now: a second wick "just in case" without a test record; 1,000-packs bought because the order form defaulted to them; and any listing whose name merely resembles your approved wick. The Eco Braided Wicks (5 meter) and Eco Candle Wicks Loose (2 inch diameter) are real products for other jobs, not spellings of Eco C1.

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