I'm Making 100 × 200 g Candles at 10% Fragrance — How Much Fragrance Oil Should I Order Rather than Estimating from Wax Weight?

Start from the finished candle

CSI uses one convention across every guide: load is a share of the finished weight. The finished weight is the number you promise the customer, the one on the label, and the one you check with a scale when the candle has set. Every other quantity follows from it. At 10%, the formula is oil = 200 g × 0.10 = 20 g and wax = 200 g − 20 g = 180 g, for each candle.

That check row is the whole point of starting here. Oil plus wax must add up to the finished weight you promised. If you work from the finished candle, it always does. If you start from a wax figure, it only adds up if you remember to convert, and at 10% forgetting to convert costs 2 g in every candle. The wax side of the same 100 × 200 g at 10% order works through the wax purchase in the same way.

There are good reasons makers reach for wax weight anyway. Wax comes in bags, so it feels like the natural starting point. Many online calculators and recipes quote "per kilo of wax". And when you already have wax on the shelf, the question naturally becomes "how much oil do I add to this?". All of those are fine, as long as you use the right conversion, which is the subject of the next section.

Three wax-based shortcuts, tested

Method B uses the right amount of wax but calculates oil as a percentage of it. The candles come out at 9.09%, and the batch is 200 g of oil short of what the test candle had, so each candle weighs 198 g. If you then top up the candle weight with more wax to reach 200 g, the load drops again.

Method C is the most expensive. The maker reads "100 × 200 g" as "20 kg of wax", buys 20 kg, and adds 10% of it as oil. The oil figure happens to be right, but it is now spread through 22 kg of mixture, so the load is 9.09%. There is also 2 kg of wax nobody needs, and at ₹599.00 a kilo for Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, that is ₹1,198.00 of surplus. The two errors can cancel on paper and still produce the wrong candle.

Method D is the correct way to start from wax. If you have weighed the wax first, the oil that gives a true 10% is wax × 0.10 ÷ 0.90, not wax × 0.10. For 18,000 g of wax, that is exactly 2,000 g. For one 180 g portion, 20 g. The divisor is 1 − load, so at 8% you divide by 0.92, at 12% by 0.88.

The shortfall column follows a simple rule: shortfall = total finished weight × load². For this order, 20,000 g × 0.10² = 200 g. At 6% it is only 72 g, which many makers never notice. At 10% it is 200 g, and at 12% (only allowed in Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, rated up to 13%) it is 288 g. The higher your load, the more it matters which convention you use. The 50-candle weighing guide shows the same trap at 8%.

10% against the wax

At 10%, the load is high enough that the wax's stated ceiling matters. Only two CSI waxes have a published fragrance ceiling, and both are wax makers' stated formulation maximums, not regulatory limits and not the best-performing load:

In CSI 464, a 10% candle is at the maximum the wax maker states, and a small weighing error or a generous top-up pushes it over. That is another reason to calculate from finished weight: Method C looks like 10% but is 9.09%, and a maker who later "corrects" it by adding oil can overshoot. In Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, 10% has headroom. A higher load is not automatically a stronger candle. CSI publishes no throw data for any oil, so choose the load by testing, and use the ceiling only as a limit.

Ordering 2,100 g

Makers commonly plan 3–5% extra for pour loss and test burns. At 5%, step 2 becomes 100 g and the total 2,140 g, which needs one more 50 g or 100 g bottle. Two test candles is a minimum for a recipe you have made before at this load. If 10% is new to you, test it properly against 8% before ordering: sizing a test round covers how.

The Method B column shows why the shortcut is tempting: ordering 1,800 g of Sandalwood saves ₹1,508.04 against the correct 2,100 g. That saving is not real. It is the price of a weaker candle than the one you tested, and of running short if you do follow the recipe. At a 10% load, fragrance is also the biggest single cost in the candle: 20 g of Sandalwood at ₹5.03 a gram is ₹100.60, almost as much as the 180 g of wax at ₹599.00 a kilo (₹107.82).

The priced order

That is ₹300.20 per saleable candle in raw materials, before labour, packaging, freight and GST. Note the wax line: 3 × 5 kg + 4 × 1 kg (₹11,381.00) is cheaper than 10 kg + 5 kg + 4 × 1 kg (₹11,390.00) because the Chunks' 10 kg bag is priced at ₹599.90 a kilo against ₹599.00 in the 5 kg. Wick size for a 10% candle in your jar is not published. A higher load can change how a wick behaves, so burn-test before the run.

The same finished-weight habit runs through the rest of this cluster. Consumption for 500 × 150 g at 8% tracks where every gram goes during a run, and the 6% version of this order shows the bottle-sizing side of the same hundred candles.

Keep the finished-weight habit when things change mid-run as well. If a client moves from 200 g to 180 g candles, recalculate from 180 g × 10% = 18 g, not by trimming the wax. If a client adds fifty candles, add 50 × 20 g = 1,000 g of oil and 9,000 g of wax. Recalculating when a client increases the order covers that case in full.

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