One Fragrance Costs ₹4,500/kg and Works Beautifully at 6% While Another Costs ₹2,500/kg but Needs 10% — Which Is Cheaper per Candle?

The sum, line by line, for 200 g and 150 g

Your title gives four figures: ₹4,500.00 a kilo at 6% for oil A, ₹2,500.00 a kilo at 10% for oil B. They are yours, not CSI's, and nothing here assumes who supplies either oil. Load is a percentage of total candle weight (CSI's convention: a 200 g candle at 6% is 12 g of oil and 188 g of wax). If you calculate load on wax weight instead, convert first; the 8% of wax or of total weight guide shows how.

The intuition many makers carry is that an oil working at 6% must be the bargain, because it needs 40% less oil. It does need less: 12 g against 20 g. But it costs 1.80 times as much per gram, and that ratio is bigger than the load ratio of 1.67. Whenever the price ratio beats the load ratio, the cheaper-per-kilo oil stays cheaper per candle. Here it beats it by enough to leave ₹4.00 a candle on the oil line alone.

Now the full bill of materials. Wax and wick are CSI prices; jar and box are your own supplier's figures, labelled as worked examples. Nothing below the oil line changes between the arms except wax.

Oil B's candle is 3.4% cheaper to make. Notice what the table also says: fragrance is about a fifth of this candle, and wax, at more than two-fifths, is the biggest line. That is why the wax term in the next section is not a rounding detail. Costs exclude labour, freight, GST and marketing.

The wax term: why it widens the gap

A lower load does not shrink the candle. The jar is still filled to the same line, so every gram of oil you save is replaced by a gram of wax. That replacement is cheap next to oil, but it is never nothing: at ₹0.60 a gram (Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, ₹5,999.00 for 10 kg), the 6% candle's extra 8 g of wax costs ₹4.80. Oil A's apparent saving in grams is partly spent on wax.

The cleanest way to see it is to net the wax out of each oil's price. Oil A costs ₹4.50 a gram but displaces wax worth ₹0.60, so each gram of A really adds ₹3.90 to the candle over wax. Oil B adds ₹1.90 a gram. Multiply by the grams each needs:

On oil alone you would report a ₹4.00 gap; with wax it is ₹8.80, more than double. The direction matters: the wax term always works against the low-load oil, because the low-load candle is the one carrying more wax. In supplier comparisons where the dearer oil wins narrowly, as in the supplier A against supplier B calculation, the same term can erase the dearer oil's lead. Here it simply makes the cheaper oil's lead safer.

Your wax price changes the size of the effect, not its direction. On Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 at ₹0.51 a gram the 8 g would cost ₹4.06; on a pricier coconut blend, more. The extra wax in a lower-load candle is worth counting whichever wax you pour.

Break-even price and break-even load

A single answer ("B by ₹8.80") tells you what to do today. The break-evens tell you what would change the answer: a price rise on oil B, a discount on oil A, or a test showing a different load.

The oil-only break-even of ₹4,166.67 is the figure many makers quote, and it is a clean rule: an oil that needs 6% ties with a ₹2,500.00 oil at 10% when it costs 10 ÷ 6 times as much, ₹4,166.67 a kilo. Counting wax pulls the real break-even down to ₹3,766.73. If oil A's supplier offered you ₹4,200.00 a kilo, the oil-only rule would call that a saving; the full sum says it is still dearer per candle.

Small changes in the test result move the answer more than small changes in price. Here is what happens if your test had approved oil A one point either side of 6%, and oil B one point either side of 10%:

Only one cell favours oil A: oil A at 5% against oil B at 11%, past the "6-10%" that many oil pages state for candles. In every combination inside the stated ranges, oil B is cheaper, by anything from ₹1.00 to ₹20.40 a candle. So the cost decision is settled; what still needs settling is whether oil B at 10% (or 9%) is a candle you are happy to sell.

Second-order effects: wick, ceilings, rejects

1. The wick may differ between a 6% and a 10% candle

Higher loads can make a flame smaller or sootier and commonly change what wick a candle wants; heavier oils especially. If your wick ladder lets the 6% candle step down from Eco C2 (₹9.44) to C1 (₹5.90), oil A claws back ₹3.54, and B's lead falls to ₹5.26. If, on top of that, the 10% candle needs Cotton Braided (₹12.00) instead of C2, B gives back another ₹2.56, and its lead is ₹2.70. Even with both wick effects running against it, oil B is still cheaper. Treat these as possibilities your wick ladder confirms or rules out, never as savings to book in advance (whether a lower load also improves wick behaviour).

2. Ceilings: 10% is at the edge for some waxes

Two ceilings govern any load: the wax maker's stated maximum and the oil page's stated candle maximum, and the lower one wins. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks states "up to 13% fragrance load capacity", so a 10% candle is comfortably inside it. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 states "Fragrance Load Up to 10%" without saying whether that is of wax or of total weight. A 10% load on total weight is 11.11% of the wax weight; if the page means wax weight, its ceiling is 9.09% of total, and your 10% candle is past it. On the oil side, many pages, including both CSI oils on this page, state "candles (6-10%)". Ceilings are formulation limits, not regulatory ones, but a 10% oil has no headroom: if a hot week or a new batch shows sweating, there is no "add a little more" left. That headroom is worth something even if it never appears on the BOM.

3. Rejects: how many extra before oil B loses?

More oil can mean more sweating or pooling in some waxes, and that shows up as candles you cannot sell. Price it as a reject rate: cost per saleable candle = cost per poured candle ÷ (1 − reject rate). On oil B's ₹247.42 candle, each extra percentage point of rejects adds ₹2.50. Oil B can carry 3.43% more rejects than oil A before it costs more per saleable candle. If your records show the 10% candle sweats in summer and you lose one in twenty, the saving is gone. Use your own reject log; we publish no sweating data for any oil.

Mapped to real CSI oils near those prices

Your two prices sit near two real CSI oils. Woody Oud is ₹4,531.20 a kilo, within a few paise a gram of your oil A; two other in-stock CSI oils are within a few paise a gram of that too. Nothing CSI sells is at ₹2,500.00: Citrus Lemon, at ₹2,832.00, is the cheapest 1 kg on CSI's list of 101 oils sold in a 1 kg pack. Put them through the same sum, purely as arithmetic. An oud and a lemon are not substitutes; nobody swaps one for the other to save money.

This pair is the useful warning. The price ratio here (1.60) is slightly under the load ratio (1.67), so on oil alone the 6% oil wins, by ₹2.27. Count the wax and the result flips: the 10% oil wins by ₹2.53. An oil-only comparison would have picked the wrong oil. Your own pair is not this close, because 1.80 is well above 1.67, but if your prices drift towards each other, this is how a near-tie looks.

Pack size moves CSI prices more than load does at small volumes. Woody Oud is ₹4.53 a gram from 100 g to 1 kg, so 12 g costs ₹54.37 whether you buy 100 g or 1 kg, but ₹74.58 from a 15 g bottle. Citrus Lemon falls from ₹3.00 a gram at 100 g to ₹2.83 at 1 kg: 20 g is ₹60.00 or ₹56.64. If you compare your oils' prices with ours, compare like packs.

What it is worth, and the test before you bank it

Multiply by volume. At 300 candles a month of this scent (worked example; use your own), ₹8.80 a candle is ₹2,640.00 a month and ₹31,680.00 a year. At 100 a month, ₹10,560.00 a year; at 1,000 a month, ₹1,05,600.00. The oil-only view would have reported ₹14,400.00 a year at 300 a month and under-counted the saving by more than half.

The 9% candles earn their place. If oil B passes at 9%, it costs ₹154.18 in oil and wax, and its lead over oil A grows to ₹12.60. Which loads to ladder, and how far down to go, is the job of the lower-load test design; here the point is only that "needs 10%" is a claim worth testing once, cheaply, before you build a year of production on it.

What the customer must not notice: the scent they know, the throw at the distance they expect, the burn time, and the colour of the wax. If oil A and oil B are two different scents, none of this is a cost decision; it is a range decision. The retest checklist for a fragrance change (hot and cold throw, wick, colour, sweating, stability, full-life burn) is what to retest when changing fragrance oil, and whether a cheaper wax that needs less fragrance changes the economics is the dearer-wax, less-fragrance comparison.

What to buy for the check

The four CSI products that appear in the sums above, chosen on page statements, price ladders and stock on 4 October 2026. CSI publishes no throw or burn data, so nothing is ranked on performance. The oil tables show cost per candle at the load from your title (6% for the oil A slot, 10% for the oil B slot) in a 200 g candle.

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