If I Change Only the Wax Supplier, Which Existing Test Results Can I Keep and Which Should I Repeat?

The result ledger: eighteen lines, four words

When a maker asks "do I need to retest?" after a wax change, the honest answer is "some of it" — and the useful answer names the lines. Every result in a candle test file depends on one or more physical things: the oil, the jar, the wick, the wax, the process. A result survives a change only if nothing it depends on has changed. The ledger below lists the eighteen result lines most small businesses keep, says what each one depends on, and gives it one of the four words used across this series: KEEP, CONFIRM, REPEAT or NEW.

Count them: 3 KEEP, 2 CONFIRM, 2 NEW and 11 REPEAT. That ratio is the real answer to the title. What you keep is the paperwork and the parts of the candle the wax never touches — the oil's documents, the jar, the identity of the wick. What you repeat is everything that happens once the wax is melted, poured, cured, stored or burned. It is not a comforting ratio, but it is a short test plan once you see that most REPEAT lines come out of the same burn set.

Why the wax reaches so many lines

It is tempting to think of wax as the neutral part of the candle — the carrier for the scent. In practice it is the fuel. The wick does not burn wax directly; it draws melted wax up by capillary action and burns the vapour. So anything that changes how the wax melts, how runny the melted pool is, and how the fragrance oil sits in it can change how the wick behaves, even when the wick itself is identical. That is why a correct wick can start tunnelling after a wax change, and why a faster full melt pool may point to a smaller wick.

Two container soy waxes can look and feel almost the same in the bag and still differ in how they melt, how the pool flows and how they hold oil. CSI does not publish melt points, congeal points, hardness or oil-retention figures for any of its waxes, and nor do many suppliers to small businesses — so the comparison has to be made in the jar, not on paper. The look-and-feel post covers why appearance in the bag is not evidence.

The last row is the one that can stop a change before any candle is poured. On CSI's listings, Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are rated by the wax maker up to 13% fragrance load and Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 up to 10%. If your approved formula runs at 12% and your new wax is rated to 10%, you are not changing only the wax — you are changing the formula too, and the whole candle is a revised formulation. No ceiling is published in this data for Natural Soy Pearl Wax or Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468; ask the product page or CSI on WhatsApp before assuming one.

The two NEW lines you did not need before

NEW lines are the questions the old file never had to answer because the old wax answered them by default. After a wax change there are two. The first is the fragrance-load check: write down the new wax maker's stated maximum next to your formula's load. At 8% on a 200 g candle — 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax, with load measured as a share of the finished candle — you sit inside both CSI figures. If your old recipe card measured oil as a share of the wax (16 g into 184 g = 8.70% of wax, but 8% of the candle), say which convention you use before comparing to a ceiling.

The second is the process window. Melt, fragrance-addition and pour temperatures belong to the wax, not to your candle, and the new wax maker's instructions replace the old ones. The only temperature CSI has on record is its own earlier guidance for CSI 464: 80–90°C for melting and pouring — confirm on the product page. For every other wax, follow the wax maker's instructions. Do not carry the old wax's temperatures across by habit; a surface fault in the first pour is as likely to be a process mismatch as a wax problem, which is the whole subject of the rough-tops post.

The CONFIRM lines: three weighed pours

Two lines are CONFIRM rather than REPEAT because they do not need a burn — only a scale. Different waxes can weigh differently at the same fill line in the same jar, because a wax's density and the way it shrinks as it sets vary. The CONFIRM check is quick: pour three jars of the new wax to your usual fill line, let them set fully, weigh them, and compare with three old-wax jars poured the same way. CSI publishes no density figure for its waxes and does not publish a fill weight for the White Matte Glass Jar, so this is your measurement, not ours.

If the new wax lands lighter at the same line, your label's net weight may no longer be honest, and moving the fill line changes the candle's height of wax — which is a burn-test variable. That is why the fill-weight CONFIRM happens before the burn set is poured: settle the fill weight first, then pour the burn candles at that weight.

The REPEAT set: one burn set, one storage set

Every burn line — time to full pool, depth, tunnelling, flame, mushrooming, soot, jar heat, hot throw, consumption and full-life — comes out of the same burn set: three candles in the new wax and three controls in the old wax, poured on the same day with the same oil, jar and wick. Every storage line — sweating, frosting, colour, cold throw over time, surface after setting — comes out of a storage set of two new and two controls that are never lit. That is 10 candles for one SKU. The three-per-variant burn set and two-per-variant storage set are working practice, not a standard.

Consumption is worth computing properly because it is the one burn line that is a hard number. Weigh the candle before and after each cycle and divide the loss by the hours burned: 12 g lost in 4 hours is 3 g per hour. Compare new with control cycle by cycle. A new wax that burns noticeably faster in the same jar with the same wick is telling you the wick is drawing more fuel — which is usually visible on the flame and heat lines too.

The priced kit, stage by stage

The worked example is one SKU: a 200 g candle in a White Matte Glass Jar, Blue Ocean Fragrance Oil at 8% (16 g per candle), an Eco Thin C1 wick, and the new wax Luxury Soy Wax Chunks. The controls use your current approved wax, so the kit buys only new wax for the 5 new candles, plus jars and wicks for all 10. The oil comes from your own stock: 13 candles × 16 g = 208 g of Blue Ocean, worth ₹1,029.60 at its 100 g rate of ₹4.95/g. A 5% pour-loss allowance on the wax is a labelled working assumption.

Stage 1 is ₹1,365.00; both stages together are ₹2,411.40. Buying in stages matters more than the rupees: if Stage 1 passes, you never open Stage 2. The wax is priced from the 500 g bag because Chunks are flat per kilo (₹598.00 a kilo at 500 g, ₹599.00 at 1 kg and 5 kg), so small bags carry no penalty. The Thick C2 wick is listed here only because it is the other Eco size CSI sells — nothing in CSI's data says it is the right size for your jar in the new wax, which is exactly what Stage 2 tests. Wick size per jar diameter is not published.

Decision rule and release

When both sets are scored, apply one rule. Pass if no new-wax candle is worse than the control on any safety line — flame, soot, jar heat, end-of-life — and the performance and storage lines are the same or better. Pass with change if the safety lines are fine but one performance line (usually hot throw) is weaker: that becomes a formula adjustment, which is a separate change with its own test. Escalate to Stage 2 if the wick is clearly struggling. Fail if any safety line is worse. CSI publishes no numeric flame-height or jar-temperature limit; acceptance means no worse than your approved control and within your jar supplier's guidance and the recognised fire-safety standard you work to (ASTM F2417 is a commonly cited one).

Once one SKU is released, the question becomes the rest of the range. A wax sits under every SKU that uses it, so the change-control hub brackets the range: full burn and storage sets on the SKUs most likely to fail, one-to-one confirmation on the rest. If you run many fragrances in one wax, the 20-fragrance post covers choosing the brackets from the fragrance side, and the 10-fragrance discontinued-wax post works the same problem when the old wax has gone entirely.

One final practical point: keep a sealed bag of the old wax if you can. The best control for any future complaint about this SKU is a candle poured from the wax it used to be made with. Once the old wax is used up, a retained finished candle from the last old-wax batch is the fallback reference — label it and keep it with the release record. If you change the fragrance supplier next, the fragrance-supplier post shows which of today's wax results you can carry across; if the jar changes, the jar post does the same.

Frequently asked questions