How Much Fragrance Oil Does a Candle Business Need Each Month?

The only calculation, and the one place people get it wrong

Fragrance oil for a month is units × wax weight per candle × load. The arithmetic is trivial; what makes it useful or useless is which weight you multiply by.

CSI's product pages state fragrance loads as a percentage of total wax weight — "6–10% of total wax weight", "up to 10% for soy wax". So a 200 g candle at 8% is 200 g of wax plus 16 g of oil, and 216 g goes into the jar. The other convention in circulation treats the percentage as a share of the finished candle, which for the same jar means 17.28 g of oil against 199.7 g of wax. The smell difference is negligible. The planning difference is not: on 250 candles a month that is 320 g of extra oil, ₹1,688.46 at a blended ₹5.28 a gram, and an order that quietly runs short every month for a reason nobody can find.

Two other rules belong in the sum before you multiply anything. The load you use is capped by the lower of two published figures: the wax grade's stated maximum and the oil page's stated candle range. And the load you plan on has to be the load you actually pour — if your standard is 8% but your bestseller goes out at 10% because it throws better, your monthly requirement is 25% higher for that scent than your spreadsheet says.

Run the sum for each size you sell rather than on an average candle, because the mix moves more than the count does. Ten of your 200 g jars swapped for 300 g jars is 80 g more oil in the month with the unit count unchanged — trivial once, ₹5,065.39 over a year. A single pop-up stall that sells 70 g votives instead of 200 g jars halves your oil consumption for that week while trebling your wick and jar count.

Where the oil actually goes

The gap between oil bought and oil in a jar is real, unglamorous and entirely predictable. It comes from five places, and they add up in a way that a spreadsheet built on theoretical grams never shows.

Film left in the vessel. Every pitcher, jug and melter keeps a coating of fragranced wax when you have finished pouring. On a small steel pitcher that is a few grams of mixture per batch; on a 10 kg melter it is more, and it carries over into the next batch if you do not clean between scents. Pour a batch of ten 200 g candles and lose 30 g of mixture and you have lost roughly 2.4 g of oil — about 1.5% of the 160 g you weighed in.

Drain-out in the bottle. A fragrance bottle never gives you every gram. What clings to the walls and the neck of a 1 kg bottle is small in percentage terms and irritating in practice, because it always shows up as the last candle in a run being short.

Overshoot on the scale. If you pour oil from a bottle onto a scale by eye, you overshoot, and you overshoot upwards. A gram or two per candle sounds like nothing until you multiply: 1.5 g on 250 candles is 375 g a month of unplanned oil, which is more than the entire 6% allowance most makers use. CSI lists a Candle Making Weighing Scale at ₹354.00, with only 2 units in stock in September 2026, so treat that as a mention rather than a shopping instruction; any scale that reads to 0.1 g removes this line item entirely.

Test pours and rejects. Two test candles for every new scent you assess, plus the jars that fail on a wet spot, a sunken top, a wick that drowned or a jar that cracked. Both are legitimate costs of making candles; neither belongs in the "poured and sold" number. A workshop testing two candidates a month and rejecting 2% of production is spending roughly 3% of its oil on things nobody buys.

Samples. Scent samples for a corporate enquiry, a wedding client or a reseller are oil out of the same bottle. They are usually the best-spent grams in the month — but budget them rather than discovering them.

At a thousand candles a month the same 6% is 960 g — ₹5,065.39 a month and ₹60,784.68 a year, which is the point at which measuring stops being bookkeeping and starts being a decision about equipment. Holding a batch at temperature in a Mini Electric Wax Melter at ₹2,360.00 rather than reheating a pitcher three times also cuts the number of transfers, and every transfer is a film of fragranced wax left behind.

Safety stock, lead time and the reorder point

Running out of oil mid-batch is expensive in a way that does not show up as a cost: a half-poured production run, jars washed out, a courier deadline missed, and a customer told a candle is delayed for a reason you will not enjoy explaining. Holding too much oil is expensive in a way that does show up — as cash you do not have when the festive wax order lands.

The bridge between those two is a reorder point: the stock level at which you place the next order. It has two components. The first is your lead time — the whole gap from deciding to order to being able to pour, including the day you take to decide, payment, despatch and transit to your city. CSI does not publish a despatch or delivery window, and this page will not invent one; time your own last three orders and use the longest. The second is a buffer of about a week, which is what absorbs a festival week, a courier strike, a wrong variant or a scent that turns out to be out of stock in the pack size you wanted.

Reorder point = weekly consumption × (measured lead time in weeks + 1). At 250 candles a month with a 6% allowance, weekly consumption is about 1,060 g. A two-week lead time gives a reorder point of roughly 3,180 g — ₹16,779.10 of oil that has to be sitting there when you place the order. Open the month with the month's requirement plus that reorder point and you are holding about 7,420 g, or ₹39,151.24.

Two honest qualifications. Oil shelf life is not published on CSI's fragrance oil pages — where you need it, ask on WhatsApp rather than assuming a figure, and in the meantime buy quantities you will pour inside a few months and store them sealed, cool and out of sunlight. And a reorder point is per scent, not per range: your bestseller might need three weeks of cover while a seasonal that pours twice a year needs none, because you order it deliberately for a run.

Splitting the month across your scents

A monthly total tells you almost nothing about what to buy, because scents do not sell in equal proportions and do not cost the same. Take the same 250 candles and split them the way a real five-scent range sells — one clear bestseller, one strong second, then a tail — and the picture sharpens immediately.

Three things fall out of that table that a single total would have hidden. Dark Vanilla is 24% of the units and 35% of the fragrance bill, because it is the dearest gram in the range — so a 10% swing in its sales moves your oil budget more than a 10% swing in anything else. Citrus Lemon is 16% of the units and the cheapest line on the page at ₹1,812.48, which means discounting it to clear stock costs you very little in fragrance. And the tail scents are each ordering in awkward quantities, which is where pack rounding starts to matter: 560 g is a 500 gm pack plus a 100 gm, and the 40 g you do not pour this month is next month's opening stock rather than waste.

Apply the allowance per line rather than to the total. It is the same arithmetic, but it lands in the right bottles: your bestseller does most of the pouring, most of the transfers and most of the overshoot, so most of the loss is in that line. Adding 6% to the total and then splitting it evenly is how you end up short on Lavender and long on Apple Cinnamon in the same month.

What it costs, and what it ties up

Put the three business sizes side by side and the shape of the fragrance bill becomes obvious. Note that two different numbers matter: the monthly spend, which is what leaves your account, and the stock on hand, which is what sits in bottles and is invisible on a profit and loss statement until you try to pay for wax with it.

The per-candle version of the same arithmetic is the one to keep in your head. A 200 g jar on CSI 464 is ₹101.48 of wax and ₹5.90 for an Eco Candle Wick Thin (C1) in the 100-pack. Add ₹84.42 of fragrance at the blended rate and the candle is ₹191.80 before jar, label, box or courier — and fragrance is 44% of it. That is why a load decision taken for throw reasons is also a working-capital decision: moving the whole range from 8% to 10% adds ₹2,110.58 of oil on every hundred candles.

It is also why the honest advice here runs against buying more oil. If your throw is weak, the cheapest fixes are usually not fragrance: a full 14–21 day cure, a wick that melts the whole diameter, an add temperature inside your wax page's stated window, and two full minutes of stirring. Each of those is free. Raising the load is the most expensive lever in the list and the one that shows up in your monthly requirement immediately.

Running the number for your own business

The reason to do this in an evening rather than in October is that the output is not just an order quantity. It is the first honest input to every other decision in the business: what a candle costs, which scent deserves a 1 kg pack, whether a 300 g jar at your current price is worth pouring, and how much cash you need before the festive quarter rather than during it.

When the monthly number stops being monthly

The festive spike. If November runs at three times a normal month, the oil requirement for that month is three times as well — about 12,720 g on the 250-candle example, or ₹67,116.42 — and it has to be in hand before the pour, not before the sale. Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026, and with a 14–21 day cure plus courier time that means pouring by about mid-October, so the oil order is a late-September one. A monthly average is exactly the wrong tool for that month.

Load drift. Loads creep upwards. Somebody decides a scent needs more, or a batch gets a splash extra because the throw felt weak, and the standard quietly moves. The consumption follows immediately and the spreadsheet does not. Write the load on the range sheet, weigh to it, and if you genuinely want to change it, change it deliberately and update the monthly number in the same hour.

Size mix drift. A wholesale order for 300 g jars, a corporate order for 70 g votives, a new bestseller in a bigger tin — any of these changes grams per unit without changing the unit count. This is the most common reason a reliable monthly number suddenly stops working.

New scent testing. Assessing candidates is a fixed monthly cost, not an occasional one, if you are running a range properly. Two test candles per candidate at 16 g each is 32 g per scent — a 15 gm bottle covers a single 200 g test jar, and a 50 gm pack covers three, which is the sensible size for a genuine comparison at one load on one wax.

One last thing that belongs in a monthly plan and is usually left out: the wax and wicks have to arrive in the same month as the oil. 250 candles of 200 g is 50 kg of wax — ₹25,370.00 on Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 at ₹507.40 a kilo, with the store listing 500 g, 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg packs and larger consignments going through WhatsApp — and 250 Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) at ₹5.90 each. Ordering the oil precisely and the wax approximately is the most common way a well-planned month still stops on a Tuesday.

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