How Much Fragrance Oil Should I Use in a Candle?

What the percentage is a percentage of

A fragrance load is a weight percentage, and the number you multiply matters. This series, like CSI's own guide to throw, takes load as a share of the finished candle: a 200 g candle at 8% contains 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax, and the two add up to the weight printed on your label. The other convention in common use is a share of the wax: weigh 184 g of wax and add 8% of that, which is 14.72 g. Both are legitimate and the gap is small in the middle of the range — but it is not zero, and it is worth knowing which one you are using before you compare your recipe with anybody else's. The full arithmetic of both, with a weighing method, is in how to calculate fragrance load for candles.

CSI's own product pages show both phrasings, which is a useful reminder that neither is a standard. The Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page states its recommendation as "Recommended fragrance load: 8% to 13% of total wax weight" with "10% Recommended". The CSI 464 and CSI 468 pages simply state "Fragrance Load Up to 10%" and "Fragrance Load Up to 13%". Read on the wax basis, 13% of 174 g of wax would be 22.62 g rather than 26 g — so when you are deliberately working near a ceiling, the finished-candle figure is the more conservative of the two, which is why this guide uses it throughout.

A note on vessels: most in-stock CSI jars state capacity in millilitres, not grams, and wax is lighter than water, so 200 ml is not 200 g of candle. Where a page states a gram fill — the 70 gram votives, the 120 gm amber jar, the 150 gram jars — plan from that. Where it states millilitres, pour one, weigh the finished candle, and use that weight from then on.

The grams table: nine candle sizes, four loads

This is the table to print and stick above the melter. Oil is the finished candle weight × load; wax is the remainder. The last column is the number of that candle one 100 g bottle of oil will scent at 8%, which is the figure that tells you what size bottle to buy.

Two things fall out of the table. First, the 13% column is not 5% more oil than the 8% column — it is 62.5% more: 26 g against 16 g on a 200 g candle. Percentage points are small words for real quantities of a bought liquid. Second, oil goes furthest in small vessels: one 100 g bottle scents six 200 g candles or seventeen 70 g votives. Test a new scent in the smallest vessel you intend to sell.

What your wax allows — the ceiling, not the target

The maximum is not a general candle-making fact; it is a property of the wax in your bag, stated by the wax maker, describing how much oil that wax holds in solution. Four in-stock CSI waxes publish a figure. The rest publish nothing, which is information too: it means your own burn test is the only evidence you will have, so start low. The table below is every candle wax CSI lists in a soy, coconut-soy or paraffin form, with what its page actually says.

What the oil's own page says — the second half of the answer

Most CSI candle-oil listings publish a usage band of their own, and a few go further and tell you what the low end and the high end are for. This is the most under-used information on the store, because it is written per scent rather than per wax: a light citrus and a dense gourmand are not the same job at the same number. Every quote below is the wording on that product's own page.

Notice the Autumn row. Its page prints 7-11% for candles, which is higher at the top than the usual 6-10%, and 11% is above the ceiling stated for CSI 464. That is exactly the situation the overlap rule is for: in CSI 464 your maximum is 10%, whatever the oil page allows; in Luxury Soy Wax Chunks or CSI 468 you could go to 11% because both waxes state 13%. The lower of the two stated numbers always wins, and there is no version of this where you take the higher one because it suits you.

Where to start, in five steps

This is the whole method, and it takes one afternoon plus a fortnight of waiting. It is written for two jars because two jars is the smallest test that can tell you anything: one load, one wick, two burn dates.

How much oil to buy for the candles you plan to pour

Once the grams are settled, the purchase is arithmetic. Each card below shows every size the oil ships in, the price per kilo at each, and how many 120 g jars at 8% — 9.6 g of oil each — a pack will scent. The three are chosen for what their pages state about load rather than for being the cheapest: one fresh citrus, one gourmand and one earthy Indian direction with unusually specific dosing guidance.

What each percentage point actually costs

A load is a scent decision and a cost line at the same time. On a 200 g candle, one percentage point is 2 g of oil — trivial as a weight, and anything from ₹5.66 to ₹15.29 depending on which bottle it comes out of. Across a hundred candles that same point is ₹566 to ₹1,529, which is usually the difference between a comfortable margin and an awkward one.

The 13% column carries a caution: two of those five oil pages state a soy load of up to 10%, so 13% is off the table for them whatever the wax permits. The two limits are independent and you need both to say yes. Where both do allow it, remember what you are buying — on Dark Vanilla, 8% to 13% adds ₹76.46 per candle, ₹7,646 per hundred, for a step no customer has yet told you they can smell.

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