I'm Producing a Large Wedding Order with Custom Colours and Fragrances — How Much Additional Wax and Fragrance Should I Allow for Colour Matching and Fragrance Approval Tests?

Count the approval rounds in candles

A custom wedding order has two things the client must sign off before you pour: the colour and the scent. Each takes rounds, and each round is a number of real candles in the real jar. Pour them in the production jar, wax and wick, because a shade that looks right in a spoon or a thin chip reads quite differently in a 50 g jar, and a scent judged in a test pot is a different candle. The counts below are working assumptions for a two-colour, two-scent order; change them to match your client and your experience.

Separating the variables keeps each round honest. Colour rounds are unscented so that a shade difference is only a dye difference. Fragrance rounds are undyed so that the client judges only scent. The combined round is the one that catches interactions: some fragrance oils are commonly associated with colour shift in wax over time, vanilla-type notes especially, and a shade approved unscented can drift once the chosen oil goes in. We do not publish colour-change data for any individual oil, so the combined round is where you find out. Leave the combined candles for a few days before the client sees them.

In material terms, the colour rounds are all wax: 18 × 50 g = 0.90 kg. The fragrance and combined rounds are 46 g of wax and 4 g of oil each, the load being a share of the finished weight as throughout this series: 26 candles use 1.20 kg of wax and 104 g of oil. With 3% pour loss, the pre-production wax is 2.16 kg. Against a production run of 55.2 kg of wax, that is small, but it is real, and on a 50 g favour it is 44 jars you must also have in hand.

Dyes: what is available and what is not published

Two honest limits shape the colour plan. First, dye doses are not published in our data: we cannot tell you how many grams of a dye colour a kilo of wax, so this page does not. Follow each dye's product page and treat your colour rounds as the measurement. Second, availability: on the pull date, the green and yellow liquid dyes and the green dye chips were out of stock. A sage green therefore has to be built from what is listed.

Batch consistency is the other colour risk. Dye measured by the drop or the chip varies a little from batch to batch, and two melter-loads of "the same" pink can differ enough to show when favours stand side by side on a table. Two habits reduce it: make each colour in as few dye batches as your melter allows, and keep a retained reference candle from the approved round beside you while pouring. The shade-reject allowance in production exists for the batches that still come out wrong.

Fragrance approval, costed

Each colour slot has three candidate scents, and each candidate needs three 50 g candles: one for your own burn, two for the client. At 4 g of oil per candle that is 12 g per candidate, which a single 15 g bottle covers with 3 g spare. Where an oil starts at 50 g, the 50 g is its tester. CSI does not sell a fragrance sample pack or discovery set; this is how you build one from the listed sizes.

Pink Crush has no 15 g, so its tester is the 50 g at ₹444.00, the dearest line in the table; if budget is tight, it is the one to question. We have not published throw measurements for any oil, so the candidates are chosen for the colour story (a cherry blossom and a rose for pink, a gardenia and a green tea for green), not ranked by strength. The client's nose, in your wax and jar, decides. A Client Wants 1,000 Candles but Expects 20 Samples Before Final Production — Should the Sample Raw Materials be Included in My Procurement Calculation? goes further into structuring a sample stage when scent is the only open question.

Production with a shade-reject allowance

Once colour and scent are approved, production gets two allowances. A 2% shade-reject allowance covers favours that set a visibly different shade from the approved reference and must be pulled. Like any reject rate, it is divided out: to finish 700 pink favours at 2% rejects you pour 700 ÷ 0.98 = 715, and for 500 green, 511. Then a 3% pour-loss allowance applies to all the material. Both are labelled working assumptions.

Put together, the approval rounds and the shade rejects add 70 candles to a 1,200-favour order, about 5.8%. Pour loss adds 3% of material on top. That is noticeably more than a single-scent, uncoloured order would need, and it should be: every additional decision the client makes is a round of candles. I Have a 10,000-Piece Festive Candle Order — How Much Additional Raw Material Should I Purchase Above the Theoretical Requirement to Protect Against Production Loss? covers the general allowance stack; this page adds the colour-specific layers to it.

The priced order

The wax is rated to a 10% fragrance load by its maker, so 8% sits inside it; CSI's own earlier guidance for CSI 464 is a melt and pour range of 80–90°C, which you should confirm on the product page. The wick is priced as an example; wick size for the velvet jar is not published, so the approval candles double as your burn test. One dye of each is priced because the quantity needed is not published; if your colour rounds show you need more, reorder then. The jar is red; if the wedding palette needs a white exterior, the white version was out of stock on the pull date, so ask on WhatsApp before designing around it.

If the client also expects formal samples of the finished favour before releasing the order, those are separate from your approval rounds; A Client Wants 1,000 Candles but Expects 20 Samples Before Final Production — Should the Sample Raw Materials be Included in My Procurement Calculation? covers them. If the order may grow, the dyed wax and the chosen oils are both client-specific, which changes the buy-now-or-wait decision; My Client May Increase a 1,000-Candle Order by 20% at the Last Minute — Should I Buy Additional Raw Materials Now or Wait for Confirmation? works through it. And if this wedding shares a month with other jobs, pool the undyed wax across all of them and keep the dyes, oils and jars per order, as I Have Three Bulk Orders Happening in the Same Month — How Do I Combine Their Wax Requirements While Keeping Fragrance Oils and Packaging Quantities Separate? shows. For the basic favour maths without custom colours, I Have a Wedding Order for 300 × 80 g Candles — How Much Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wick and How Many Jars Should I Order Including Backup Units? and I Need 1,000 × 60 g Wedding Favours — How Much Wax Should I Buy When I Also Need 50 Additional Candles for Samples, Replacements and Breakage? start from scratch.

Frequently asked questions