My Candle Has Good Adhesion at 6% Fragrance but Becomes Patchy at 10% — Should I Optimise Fragrance Load Before Replacing the Wax?

What your result most likely means, and the first test

Good adhesion at 6% and patchy jars at 10% points first at the load, not the wax. The same wax lot, the same jar and the same routine were working at the lower load; the variable that moved is the amount of oil. Fragrance oil dissolved in soy wax is commonly described as changing how the wax crystallises and contracts as it cools, and the more oil there is, the more room it has to change that set. Somewhere between 6% and 10% your candle crosses an edge where, in your jar and your conditions, the wax starts letting go of the glass. Your job is to find that edge, not to replace the material that was working below it.

There is a second reason load comes first. If your wax is Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464, CSI's product page states a fragrance load of up to 10%. At 10% you are pouring at the wax maker's stated maximum — a formulation ceiling, not a target, and not a recommendation. A candle built at a material's ceiling has no margin for a warm afternoon, a slightly different oil lot or a jar from a new box. In Luxury Soy Wax Chunks or Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468, whose pages state 13%, 10% sits further inside the stated limit, but the same logic applies: where spotting starts depends on your oil, jar and routine, and only your jars can show it.

The first test is a load ladder: unscented control, 6%, 8% and 10% poured from one melt into one pack of jars, three jars each, cooled side by side. In this page's worked example — an illustrative 160 g fill in CSI's clear 200 ml Salsa Glass Jar with Japanese Cherry Blossom in CSI 464 — the arms carry 9.6 g, 12.8 g and 16.0 g of oil. The ladder tells you whether spotting rises with load in a clean, controlled pour, and roughly where it starts. It also tells you something your 6%/10% observation cannot: whether the 10% candles were spotted because of the oil, or because the 10% batch was made on a different day, in a different box of jars or at a different pour temperature.

First, make sure 6% and 10% were compared fairly

Most 6%-versus-10% observations come from candles poured on different days. Before you trust the comparison, ask four questions of your own records. Were both batches poured from the same wax bag? Into jars from the same box, cleaned the same way? At the same measured pour temperature? Cooled in the same place, in the same room conditions? If the answer to any of them is no, the load is only one of several differences. That is why the ladder pours every arm from one melt on one day — it removes the other differences instead of arguing about them.

Then confirm the patches really are wet spots. A wet spot is commonly described as an area where wax has separated from the glass, leaving a thin air gap that reads darker and glossier through clear glass. At higher loads, there is a look-alike that is not an adhesion problem at all: sweating, where oil beads or films on the top surface. Sweating says the wax is struggling to hold the oil; wet spots say the wax has let go of the glass. Both can appear as load rises, and both point to the same first fix — a lower load — but they are recorded separately on the sheet below. Dark patches with no liquid inside sets out how to tell them apart and what the pattern of spotting can suggest.

The load ladder, step by step

The ladder works because only one thing changes between arms. Same wax lot, same oil bottle, same jar pack, same cleaning, same wick from the same pack, same measured pour temperature, same cooling row. Follow CSI 464's product page for temperature — it gives an 80–90°C melt/pour working range. The clear Salsa jar's page publishes no hot-pour limit, so check your jar supplier's guidance, or ask CSI on WhatsApp, before pouring at the top of that range. If you test in CSI's Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid (150 gram) instead, its page states "safe for hot pour up to 85°C", which limits CSI 464 pours in that jar to 80–85°C — say so on your sheet.

Photograph every jar from its four marked sides against a plain light background at fixed checkpoints. This series uses pour day, 48 hours, 7 days, after a temperature cycle and 30 days as labelled examples. The temperature cycle matters here, because a candle at its load ceiling may look clean on the bench and let go after a few warm days in storage or a courier van. An example cycle is 8 hours warm and 16 hours at room temperature, three to five times — but use your own logged storeroom or courier readings for the warm phase, keep it well below CSI 468's stated 50–53°C melting point, and never treat it as a storage specification. The temperature-cycle test builds it in detail.

The scoring sheet for a load ladder

There is no industry figure for an acceptable amount of wet spotting, so you write your own house scale before the first jar is scored, and you never change it between tests. A practical scale for a ladder is the share of visible glass with any spot, estimated with a clear acetate sleeve marked in 1 cm squares, converted to a grade. Grade every jar on its own, then summarise each arm.

Write the decision rule at the top of the sheet before you pour, so the result cannot bend it. A working rule you might adopt: an arm is clean if no jar scores above 1 at the 7-day and post-cycle checkpoints; an arm is spotted if two or more of its three jars score 2 or higher. The highest clean load is your candidate. Three jars per arm is a screen; if the edge falls between two arms, round two refines it with more jars. What to record when comparing adhesion lists every column worth keeping; remember that your threshold is a house choice, not a fact.

The priced test kit

Round one is the four-arm ladder, twelve jars. Grams follow CSI's load convention (oil = W × L, wax = W − oil) with a 5% pour-loss working allowance. The 160 g fill is illustrative: the Salsa jar's fill weight is not published — 200 ml is its brim volume — so weigh one jar filled to your fill line and replace the figure before you buy.

Round two runs only if round one shows a clear edge. It refines between the last clean arm and the first spotted one — in this example 7% and 9% — repeats 10% as the known-bad reference, and re-pours an unscented control from the same melt: 12 more jars. Using round one's leftovers (105.0 g of wax, 9.0 g of oil and 3 jars), it adds 2 × 1 kg of CSI 464 (₹1,014.80), 1 × 100 g + 2 × 15 g of Japanese Cherry Blossom (₹708.00), 2 × pack of 5 of jars (₹401.20) and 1 × 20 wicks (₹118.00) — ₹2,242.00 in all.

What a lower load saves — and what spotting costs

Lowering load is the rare quality fix that also cuts cost. Japanese Cherry Blossom is ₹5.00 a gram at 100 g and ₹4.84 a gram at 1 kg. In a 160 g candle, each percentage point of load is 1.6 g of oil — ₹7.75 at the 1 kg rate.

Dropping from 10% to 8% saves ₹15.49 a candle, ₹7,747.20 on an example run of 500; dropping to 6% saves ₹30.99 a candle. Those are fragrance savings only, and they only count if the lower load still passes your hot-throw test — a cheaper candle that does not smell is not a saving. The second table puts the whole candle together: CSI 464 at the 5 kg rate, the oil at the 1 kg rate, the Salsa jar at the pack-of-100 rate (₹29.50) and an Eco Thin C1 at ₹5.90 as the example wick line — CSI does not publish a wick size for this jar. The reject rates are examples to show the arithmetic; your own ladder counts replace them.

With those example figures the 10% candle costs ₹265.63 per sellable jar against ₹191.19 at 8% — the spotted jars carry the cost of the clean ones. Moving the same 10% candle into CSI 468 costs ₹204.60 per jar poured before any rejects, because CSI 468 is ₹637.00 a kilo at the 5 kg rate against ₹507.40 for CSI 464, and nobody can tell you its reject rate in your jar without a test. Cost per visually acceptable candle and the cost of cosmetic rejects take that arithmetic further.

The decision rule: load first, wax last

Read the ladder at 7 days and again after the temperature cycle. Stop at the first line that is true.

Notice how the rule treats the wax: it is the last line, reached only when no load is both clean and strong enough. If you get there, the fair test is the same oil at the same load in a second wax, with the same jar, wick and routine, and an unscented control in each wax — a round two with the CSI 468 wax arm costs 1 × 1 kg of CSI 468 (₹650.00) for three scented and three unscented jars. And a winning wax still needs its own wick and throw checks before production; which tests repeat after a wax change lists them.

The CSI products in this ladder

Where to go next

This post owns one question: whether a lower load fixes adhesion before you touch the wax. Its neighbours own the questions that follow. The section hub separates the oil from the scented routine with a three-arm split pour. Oud versus citrus asks whether every fragrance needs its own adhesion test, and the dye post adds colour to the picture. If your load fix works for one oil but not another, the one-difficult-fragrance post shows how to treat that oil on its own. Stress-testing the hardest fragrance shows how a ladder like this feeds a wax comparison later.

Frequently asked questions