A Wedding Client Wants 500 Candles Matching the Exact Wedding Colour Palette — How Do I Create a Repeatable Dye Formula Before Mass Production?

The palette order as numbers

The title gives the quantity and the requirement: an exact match to the wedding palette. It does not give the fill or the colours, so the page uses the series default (200 g at 8% in your own jar) and a worked-example palette of three: a dusted blush, a mauve and an undyed ivory. The shades are assumed to be approved already as trial candles; how many pilot rounds a custom colour takes is the dusty-pink pilot post, and how much trial wax and dye to allocate is the colour-trial post. This page starts where they stop: turning an approved candle into a formula that produces the same colour 525 times.

One stock fact shapes palettes this season: CSI’s Green and Yellow liquid dyes are out of stock on 7 October 2026. A palette with sage or marigold would need Yellow Candle Dye Chips (₹250.00, in stock) or another route, and chips are not a like-for-like swap for liquid: their dose and dissolving behaviour must be established again (read the liquid-to-chips post). Settle the palette against what you can actually buy before the client falls in love with a swatch.

Grams per kilogram: the only unit that scales

Every repeatable formula is a ratio that survives a change of batch size. “Six drops in a 200 g jar” does not: drop size changes with how full the bottle is, the nozzle, the temperature and the angle of your hand, and nobody pours a 10 kg melt one jar at a time. Grams of dye per kilogram of finished mix (wax plus oil) does survive. If the approved trial took 0.60 g of Red in a 2 kg test pot, the dose is 0.30 g/kg, and a 10 kg melt takes 3.0 g. Write the dose for each dye in each colour; a two-dye colour is two numbers, never “Red plus a bit of Brown”.

Convert old trials honestly. If your approved trial was made with drops, weigh the drops now: tare a small cup, count 20 drops from the same bottle, weigh, repeat three times, and do it again when the bottle is half empty. The spread you see is the variation your trial already contains, and the reason the approved shade must be re-poured from a weighed formula before production (the confirmation step below).

The master concentrate

The diagram shows the first reason for a concentrate: a scale is only as good as half its step, and pale wedding colours need tiny amounts. Dissolve one part dye in nine parts melted CSI 464 and you weigh ten times as much; one in ninety-nine, a hundred times as much. The second reason matters more for an exact match: a concentrate made once for the whole order is identical in every melt it goes into. If the batch is 3% stronger than intended, every candle is 3% stronger, including the confirmation candle the client’s shade is checked against, so the palette still matches itself.

The recipe card

Everything above goes on one card per colour, versioned (B-01, M-01, I-01) and kept with the master chips. If someone else cannot pour the colour from the card, it is not a formula yet. The figures below are the worked example’s; the structure is the point. The ivory gets a card too: it has no dye, but it is the one colour that shows base-wax drift between lots most plainly, so it gets a master chip like the others.

Two lines on the card are not about dye and still decide the colour. The temperature line stays at the wax page’s figure, because holding wax hot for long periods can shift some dyes and darken some oils (a tendency; test yours rather than assume). The stir line is a written time, not “until it looks mixed”, because uneven dye in a 10 kg melt shows up as a shade gradient from the first jar to the last. How mixing time and big-batch uniformity behave for fragrance is the 10 kg mixing post; colour follows the same physics.

Light, chips, cure and wax lot

One light, written down

Choose one viewing place and keep it for the whole order: indirect daylight at a window, mid-morning, never direct sun, plus one lamp you use only for colour checks (write its colour temperature from the box on the card). Compare on a plain white card, lids off, candles touching, at arm’s length. Phone photos are records, not judges: the camera’s white balance changes from shot to shot. Shop lights and the warm bulbs of a wedding venue will make all three colours look different, which is a conversation to have with the client before approval, not after.

Master chips and retained candles

On day 0, pour two confirmation candles and two 20 g chips per colour from the concentrate at the recipe dose (440 g of scented wax per colour). On day 3, compare them with the client’s approved trial under the standard light. If they match, one chip and one candle become the masters: labelled, sealed, in a dark box. The second chip travels with production, so the master is not handled daily. If they do not match, adjust the g/kg on the card (not the concentrate) and repeat: it costs three days and a few hundred grams of wax.

Cure before judging

Soy colour reads differently while it is warm and for a while after; frosting can lighten a surface. The Ylang Ylang page states "Cure Time: 48–72 hours for soy wax"; the worked example judges colour at 72 hours, and every melt’s chip is judged at the same age as the master. Comparing a two-day chip with a two-week master is comparing two different things (the same fairness rule for scent is the same-cure-age post).

The same wax lot

Natural soy varies in base colour between lots, and a pale palette shows it first: the ivory most of all. Ask CSI on WhatsApp whether the 97.57 kg can come from one lot. CSI does not promise lot continuity in advance; if the answer is two lots, pour an ivory chip and a blush chip from each lot side by side under the standard light before either lot goes into production, and keep each lot to whole colours where you can (all blush from lot A) rather than mixing lots inside one colour.

The purchase sheet for the palette

The dyes are 1.2% of the CSI materials, about ₹2.25 a candle. That is why the advice on this page never says “use less dye to save money”: it says buy each dye once, in a bottle large enough for the whole order, so that the whole palette comes from three bottles and four concentrates. The 1 kg wax bags cost the same per kilo as the 10 kg (₹507.40), so 98 kg can be 9 × 10 kg + 8 × 1 kg without any penalty; the oil is cheaper per gram in 1 kg bottles (₹5.31) than in 500 g (₹5.43), so the 500 g is only the top-up.

Costs exclude your jars, labour, freight, packaging and GST. The order of events is: trial candles approved → dyes and the wax lot secured → concentrates and confirmation pour → masters set on day 3 → bulk oil and remaining wax, if not already bought → production with a chip per melt.

The decision rule and what protects you

The decision rule. A palette formula is ready for 500 candles when five things are true: every dye is written in g/kg of finished mix; one concentrate per dye exists for the whole order; a confirmation candle from that concentrate matches the client’s approved trial at 72 hours under the standard light; the master chip and candle are labelled and stored dark; and the wax lot is recorded, with lots compared if there is more than one. If any is missing, do not start the melt that day. The settling numbers are 3 days for the confirmation step and a worst-case weighing error under 2% per melt in the worked example (1.7% on a 1 g-step scale using concentrate).

The last line is easy to forget on a colour project. The palette here is pale, but if the client’s mauve ends up much deeper than your usual candles, the wick needs a re-check; that is the darker-dye wick post. Every lot and concentrate batch belongs on a batch sheet (structure in the batch-sheet post).

What to buy

Six items, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 7 October 2026. CSI publishes no dye dose, colour data or burn data, so nothing is ranked on performance.

Frequently asked questions