My Soy Wax Costs ₹600 Per Kg, Fragrance Oil Costs ₹4,000 Per Kg and My 200 g Jar Costs ₹80 — What Is My Actual Raw-Material Cost Per Candle at 8% Fragrance Load?

Four lines, and which of your numbers is which

Raw-material cost per candle is a small sum with a large number of ways to get it wrong. The sum itself is four lines: the wax, the fragrance oil, the vessel and the wick. Three of those you gave in your question — wax at ₹600.00 a kilogram, fragrance at ₹4,000.00 a kilogram, a jar at ₹80.00. Those are your figures and this page keeps them exactly as you wrote them, unrounded, and never treats them as CSI prices. The fourth line, the wick, you did not give, so the page uses a real one you can check: Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) at ₹5.90 each, which is what the 500 pack works out at on the store in September 2026.

The reason the sum goes wrong is almost never the multiplication. It is that fragrance load is a percentage of wax weight, not of the finished candle, and that the phrase "200 g candle" can mean either. CSI product pages state loads that way — Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 states a maximum of 10% of total wax weight, and the British Rose page states soy use up to 10% of total wax weight. Where a wax ceiling and an oil range differ, the lower one governs; here both are 10%, so 8% sits comfortably inside both. Once the load is a percentage of wax, 8% of 200 g of wax is 16 g of oil and the jar receives 216 g, not 200 g.

So the arithmetic is: 200 g of wax at your rate is ₹120.00. 16 g of oil at your rate is ₹64.00. Your jar is ₹80.00. The wick is ₹5.90. The candle is ₹269.90. Read that total once more slowly, because the shape of it is the lesson: the vessel and the wick together are ₹85.90, which is more than the fragrance, and the wax — the thing most makers shop hardest for — is under half the candle.

Which 200 g you mean, and what it is worth

"My 200 g jar" is the only genuinely ambiguous thing in your question, and it is ambiguous in a way that money can measure. A 200 g jar can mean the jar takes 200 g of wax, in which case the 16 g of fragrance sits on top and 216 g goes in. Or it can mean the finished candle weighs 200 g, in which case the wax and oil together have to add to 200 g and the wax has to come down to make room.

The second reading is a small piece of algebra rather than a subtraction. Load is a percentage of wax, so the fill is wax plus 8% of wax, or 1.08 lots of wax. Divide 200 g by 1.08 and the wax is 185.19 g; the oil is the remaining 14.81 g. Taking 8% off 200 g and calling the answer the oil is the common mistake — it gives 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax, which is an 8.7% load, not an 8% one.

Look at the last two rows before you pick a side, because they contain the useful discovery. The cost per gram of scented wax is ₹0.85 in both columns. It has to be — the recipe is the same 8% mixture either way, and a mixture has one rate. What changes is how many grams of it you pour. The cost per gram of what ends up in the jar, however, is ₹1.25 under the first reading and ₹1.28 under the second, because the jar and wick are fixed costs spread over fewer grams. The smaller candle is cheaper to make and dearer per gram, which is the whole of small-format candle economics in one line.

This page carries the first reading: 200 g of wax, 16 g of oil, 216 g poured. That is the series convention and it matches how CSI product pages state loads. It is also the safer default in practice, because most makers size a jar by how much wax fills it, then add fragrance. If your jar is genuinely full at 200 g of finished candle, use the second column and subtract ₹13.63 from every figure on this page that follows.

Doing it on your own figures, step by step

One caution about that per-gram figure: it is a rate for your mixture at your prices, and it is not portable to a different load — at 10% more of the mixture is the expensive component, so the rate rises. Keep one rate per recipe, labelled with its load.

The same candle, costed on materials you can buy today

Your rates are yours, and they may be good ones. To make the arithmetic checkable, here is the identical calculation — 200 g of wax, 16 g of oil at 8%, one vessel, one wick — run on live CSI stock in September 2026. The wax is Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464, bought as the 1 kg pack at ₹507.40, which is ₹507.40 a kilogram. The fragrance is British Rose, bought as the 1 kg pack at ₹3,068.00, which is ₹3.07 a gram. The wick is the same Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) at ₹5.90.

Read the comparison honestly, which means reading it in two halves. The wax and oil lines are a like-for-like comparison, because both columns buy the same 200 g and the same 16 g: CSI's scented wax is ₹150.57 against your ₹184.00, a difference of ₹33.43 a candle — ₹18.52 of it on the wax and ₹14.91 on the fragrance. Across a hundred candles that is ₹3,343.20. The vessel lines are not a like-for-like comparison and you should not read them as one. Your ₹80.00 jar holds a 200 g candle. The Yankee Glass Jar 130 ML at ₹47.20 is described on its product page as suited to votives and sample candles, and CSI does not publish a fill weight for it, so it is a smaller vessel at a smaller price and the two numbers are not competing.

That is exactly where the per-gram rate earns its keep. CSI's scented wax at this recipe is ₹0.70 a gram. Fill any CSI vessel with water to your wax line, weigh it, multiply by about 0.9 for soy to get the wax weight, multiply by 1.08 to get the scented-wax weight at 8%, and multiply that by ₹0.70. Add ₹47.20 for the Yankee 130 ML and ₹5.90 for the wick and you have a costed candle in a vessel you can actually order, without anyone inventing a capacity for you.

What the ₹269.90 deliberately leaves out

A raw-material cost is not a product cost, and a page that pretends otherwise is selling you confidence rather than arithmetic. CSI supplies wax, fragrance, vessels and wicks, so those four lines can be priced from a live store. Nothing else on the list below is a CSI product, which means no honest number for it exists here. Copy the table, put your own figures in the blanks, and total the sheet as materials from CSI plus your own costs.

Two of those blanks deserve a sentence each. Wastage is not a number this page will invent, but it is not zero: wax stays in the jug, a pour gets abandoned, a jar chips. This page has assumed none, which means ₹269.90 is a floor and your real figure sits above it. Measure it once — weigh the wax you start with and the candles you end with over a full batch — and you will have a percentage worth more than any industry figure. Your labour is the line makers leave blank the longest, and leaving it blank is a decision, not a neutral act. A candle that costs ₹269.90 in materials and forty minutes of your evening is not a ₹269.90 candle.

Does buying bigger bring the candle down?

The instinct after seeing ₹269.90 is to buy bigger packs. It is worth being precise about what that does at CSI, because the honest answer is not the one a costing blog usually gives. On this store the rate per kilogram is the same at most pack sizes on most waxes. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 is one of the exceptions and the step is at the bottom of the ladder, not the top: the 500 g pack is ₹520.00 a kilogram and the 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg packs are all ₹507.40 a kilogram. Moving from the 500 g pack to any of the larger ones is ₹12.60 a kilogram, which on 200 g of wax is ₹2.52 a candle. Going from 1 kg to 10 kg changes your cost per candle by nothing at all.

Fragrance oil is where the ladder is real. British Rose runs from ₹6.29 a gram at 15 gm down to ₹3.07 a gram at 1 kg. Going from the 100 gm pack at ₹3.42 a gram to the 1 kg pack saves ₹5.66 a candle — genuinely more than the wax step. Not every oil on the store behaves like this; on many of them the rate per gram is the same from 50 gm upward, so check the ladder on the oil you actually buy rather than assuming the big pack is cheaper per gram.

Now weigh that against what the bigger pack actually asks of you, because this is the part a saving per candle hides. One kilogram of fragrance oil at 16 g a candle scents 62.5 candles, and those candles need 12.5 kg of wax to go with them. Buying that kilogram costs ₹3,068.00 against ₹342.20 for the 100 gm pack — ₹2,725.80 more money committed to one scent before you know it sells. Ten 100 gm packs would come to ₹3,422.00 against ₹3,068.00 for the kilogram, so the whole prize for committing is ₹354.00. If that scent is proven and moving, take it. If it is new, the 100 gm pack is the cheaper mistake.

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