I'm Making 500 Candles in Five Fragrances With 100 Pieces of Each — How Much Fragrance Oil Should I Order for Each Scent at 8% Load?

The base arithmetic, and which 8% you actually mean

Start with one candle. A 200 g finished candle at 8% of finished weight is 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. Times 100, one scent needs 1,600 g of oil and 18.4 kg of wax. Times five, 8 kg of oil and 92 kg of wax. That is the whole calculation, and the convention this page uses throughout.

The alternative convention is 8% of the wax: 14.8 g of oil and 185.2 g of wax. That is 1.48 kg per scent, 7.4 kg across five — a gap of 600 g, which on Lavender at ₹5.221 per gram is ₹3,132.60 of stock you either bought or did not. Both framings live inside CSI's own catalogue: Luxury Soy Wax Chunks states its 13% ceiling as a percentage of total wax weight, while the cost-per-candle arithmetic everyone uses works on finished weight.

Why 1.6 kg cannot be bought cleanly — and what the three routes cost

This is what makes 500 candles in five scents different from a 5,000-candle run. CSI's fragrance ladder is at most 15 g / 50 g / 100 g / 500 g / 1 kg — no 2 kg bottle, no 5 kg jerry can, no 10 kg drum in the 92-oil range. At 5,000 candles you buy whole kilograms and pack size barely matters. At 100 candles a scent you need 1.6 kg, which no single pack delivers. That is pack granularity, and here it decides your bill more than price per kilogram does.

Three builds are sensible. A: 1 kg + 500 g + 100 g — exactly 1,600 g, nothing spare. B: two 1 kg bottles — 2,000 g, 400 g over. C: 1 kg + six 100 g bottles — again exactly 1,600 g, and it exists because on some oils the 100 g is cheaper per gram than the 500 g.

Read the bottom row twice. Route A across all five costs ₹52,475.20; each scent's own cheapest build costs ₹52,470.20 — a saving of ₹5.00. Route C throughout costs ₹52,858.20, ₹388.00 above optimal. Choosing between the exact-fit builds is trivial money. Route B is not: two kilograms per scent costs ₹65,022.00, ₹12,551.80 more, or 23.9% on top of the fragrance bill — worth more than every other optimisation on this page combined.

And the rounding penalty itself is small, which argues against the usual advice. At each oil's kilogram rate with no pack rounding at all, 1.6 kg of each of the five costs ₹52,017.60 against ₹52,470.20 for the cheapest real builds. The entire cost of pack granularity on an 8 kg order is ₹452.60 — 0.87%, ₹389.00 of it on two oils (₹294.60 Tobacco Vanilla, ₹94.40 British Rose). So the problem is not a pack premium. It is that 1.6 kg looks awkward, and an awkward number tempts people to round up to two kilograms.

The leftover question, argued honestly — and it is a per-scent decision

Route B is not stupid: one line per scent in the cart, and 400 g of headroom for the pour you spill and the candle you remake. The case against it is not that leftover oil is worthless — it is that leftover oil is only worth its price if you pour it. Valued at each oil's own kilogram rate:

If you will pour those 125 candles, route B is not an overspend — it is 125 candles of stock at your best rate. If you will not, ₹12,551.80 has left the business to sit on a shelf, ₹5,120.00 of it in one bottle of Coffee Blast. So the answer differs by scent inside one order: decide route scent by scent.

The per-gram ladder, in both directions

The 100 g bottle that completes 1.6 kg usually costs more per gram than the kilogram beneath it. On British Rose the 100 g is ₹342.20 — ₹3.422 per gram against ₹3.068, 11.5% dearer, ₹35.40 extra. On Jasmine it is ₹430.00 — ₹4.30 per gram against ₹3.923, 9.6% dearer, ₹37.70 extra. Lavender is gentler at 3.4% and Tobacco Vanilla is 6.5%. On Coffee Blast the premium is zero — ₹12.80 per gram at every rung from 15 g to 1 kg.

So read the ladder on the product page for the specific oil, every time. No general rule holds across 92 oils: some fall steeply (Mint Sandalwood's kilogram at ₹4,999.00 saves ₹491 against ten 100 g bottles, 8.9%), some are flat, a handful run backwards.

Five scents, five prices — and why one load figure may not fit all five

The commonest costing error on a multi-scent order is treating fragrance as one line: "8 kg of oil". The same 8 kg, on real CSI oils, ranges from ₹25,016.00 to ₹102,400.00 — ₹50.03 against ₹204.80 of fragrance in every candle, which decides whether the price you quoted the client works.

Coffee Blast's 1.6 kg costs 4.09 times British Rose's for the identical quantity — a ₹77,384.00 swing across five scents. The catalogue is wider still: Citrus Lemon at ₹2.832 per gram against Club De Nuit Intense inspired at ₹24.056 is an 8.49× spread at kilogram rates. Until you have chosen the actual five oils you do not have a fragrance budget, you have a guess — read the cheap-versus-premium comparison before fixing the mix.

Second, a maker may legitimately run different loads on different scents — a light citrus high in its range, a heavy gourmand lower — because the two need different doses to read the same strength in a room. CSI publishes no per-scent load recommendation: the right load for each of your oils is established by pouring and burning, not looked up. What is published is the ceiling per wax — 13% on Luxury Soy Chunks, 10% on CSI 464, 13% on CSI 468, nothing on the other thirteen.

If you do run mixed loads, compute each scent separately. Say British Rose at 10%, Coffee Blast at 6%, the other three at 8%: 2.0 kg, 1.2 kg and 1.6 kg each — still 8 kg in total and still 92 kg of wax, so an 8% average gives the right grand total and the wrong purchase at both ends. Buy 1.6 kg of British Rose and you are 400 g short, 25 candles you cannot make; buy 1.6 kg of Coffee Blast and 400 g of the dearest oil sits idle.

The same 8 kg, the same 500 candles, ₹3,987.20 less than the flat-8% version at ₹52,470.20 — because the extra grams went into the ₹3.068 oil and came out of the ₹12.80 one. That is ₹96.97 of fragrance per candle instead of ₹104.94. What this is not: a recommendation to run British Rose at 10% and Coffee Blast at 6%. The loads are yours to establish, and 10% is the published ceiling for CSI 464 — a maximum, not a target.

Wax, jars, wicks, samples — and the full purchase

Wax: 92 kg, and a single purchase. Wax is shared across all five scents, so there is no granularity problem — buy one quantity and split it at the melter. On Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464, nine 10 kg packs plus two 1 kg packs is 92 kg at ₹46,680.80 — and because CSI 464 is flat at ₹507.40/kg from 1 kg upwards, the 10 kg pack saves nothing per kilogram; the only reason to buy it is fewer parcels. There is no 25 kg pack of any wax on the store: the ladder is 500 g, 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg, with one exception below.

Jars: 500 vessels, fill weight yours to verify. The 200 ml Salsa Glass Jar with golden lug cap is ₹2,950.00 per 100, so 500 is ₹14,750.00 at ₹29.50 each, cap included. But "200 ml" is a volume, not a 200 g fill weight, and the matte glass jar family (₹708.00 per 10, ₹35,400.00 for 500) publishes no fill weight at all. Only the Apothecary Glass Candle Jar with Dome Lid at ₹212.40 publishes a fill capacity — 500 g — and at ₹106,200.00 for 500 it is a different tier. Where a jar publishes no fill capacity, pour and weigh.

Wicks, where buffer is nearly free. Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) are ₹5.90 per wick at every pack size from 10 to 1,000 — no volume break, and none needed. 500 wicks is ₹2,950.00; a spare 100 costs ₹590.00, giving ₹3,540.00 for 600. Buy the spares: a binned wick costs six rupees, a binned jar thirty, a re-poured scent whatever that oil charges per gram. Which is why buffer is sized per material, never as one flat percentage — glass breaks, wax does not, wicks are nearly free and fragrance is the expensive one. CSI publishes no wick-to-diameter chart, so test against the wick guide by jar diameter before committing 500 pieces. Stickers: Candle Wick Stickers are a 40-sticker sheet at ₹100.00, so thirteen sheets give 520 for ₹1,300.00; a Candle Care Stickers Roll is ₹413.00 for 500 at 1 inch or ₹699.00 for 1,000 at 1.5 inch.

Samples: five scents means five sample sets

A 500-candle order is not a 500-candle purchase. You need approval samples before sign-off, retained samples held back so you can reference the batch if a complaint arrives, and replacements for bench failures — and with five scents each of those multiplies by five.

Small bottles make it cheap. Four of these five stock a 15 g size: British Rose ₹94.40, Jasmine ₹103.00, Lavender ₹105.02 and Coffee Blast ₹216.00 — ₹518.42 for all four. Tobacco Vanilla stocks neither 15 g nor 50 g, so its smallest is 100 g at ₹799.00 and the complete five-scent approval set is ₹1,317.42, 2.5% of the fragrance bill. One 15 g bottle at 8% makes roughly 187 g of candle, or two 70 g votive pours with margin. Note what the ladder gaps did: one oil's missing rungs cost more in sampling than the other four combined.

Transfer loss is yours to measure. CSI publishes no wastage or loss percentage and we will not invent one — a figure from a blog is not a figure from your pitcher. Weigh the wax in and the candles out across one full batch with a weighing scale. Until you have that number, note that the exact-fit 1,600 g build carries zero grams of margin — the real argument for the 1,700 g build.

Frequently asked questions