How Much Fragrance Oil per Kg of Candle Wax?

Grams per kilogram: the whole table on one screen

Fragrance load on CSI's product pages is stated as a percentage of total wax weight. That convention is what makes the arithmetic trivial: a kilogram of wax is 1,000 g, one per cent of it is 10 g, so the grams of oil you need are simply the load multiplied by ten, per kilogram. Eight per cent of a kilogram is 80 g. There is no density conversion, no allowance for the jar, no adjustment for the wick. The wax goes on the scale, you read the weight in grams, and you multiply.

The finished candle is then heavier than the wax you weighed, which surprises people the first time. A kilogram of wax at 8% pours 1,080 g of scented wax; at 13% it pours 1,130 g. That matters when you are filling to a jar's capacity rather than to a target wax weight, and it is the single most common reason a batch runs short by one jar at the end of a pour.

Read the last two columns together and the shape of the decision appears. Moving from 6% to 10% adds 40 g of oil to every kilogram of wax. With British Rose at ₹3.07 a gram that is ₹122.72 per kilogram of wax, or ₹24.54 on a single 200 g candle. With Gilli Mitti Patchouli at ₹8.96 a gram the same four points cost ₹358.40 per kilogram. The gram table never changes; the invoice does.

The rows above 10% exist because a small number of pages state them. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks and Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 both state up to 13% of total wax weight, and on the oil side Cinnamon Vanilla states up to 13% and Japanese Cherry Blossom states 6–13%. Everywhere else, the top of the gram table is a number you can calculate but not use, because the wax page or the oil page stops lower and the lower figure governs.

Every batch size from 500 g to 25 kg

Production batches in Indian home studios tend to cluster at 1 kg (a test melt), 5 kg (a weekend's pouring) and 10 kg (a festive run). The table below gives the oil weight for each, at the four loads most CSI pages support. Everything is a straight multiplication of the per-kilogram figure, so you can extend it to any batch size you like — 3.4 kg of wax at 8% is 272 g of oil.

A note on the bottom rows. CSI sells its container soy grades in store variants up to 10 kg — Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 at ₹5,074.00 for 10 kg (₹507.40/kg) and Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at ₹5,999.00 for 10 kg. A 15 kg or 25 kg run is therefore either several packs or a WhatsApp conversation about a single consignment. Ask on +91 7397976926 before you build a costing around a quantity the store page does not list; bulk pricing and GST invoicing are handled there.

The candle count in the last column assumes a 200 g wax fill and no losses. In practice a pour leaves a film in the pot and the pitcher, and the last jar in a batch is the one that comes up short. General candle-making practice is to allow a small working margin — two to five per cent of the batch — on both wax and oil when you are pouring to a fixed number of jars for a customer. On a 5 kg batch that is 100–250 g of extra wax and 8–20 g of extra oil at 8%: cheap insurance against one unsellable jar.

Which pack to order, and the per-gram penalty for getting it wrong

CSI's oil pages carry up to five variants — commonly 15 gm, 50 gm, 100 gm, 500 gm and 1 kg — and the per-gram rate falls steadily as the pack grows. The difference is not trivial. On British Rose the 15 gm pack works out at ₹6.29 a gram and the 1 kg at ₹3.07, so the same 80 g of oil for a kilogram of wax costs ₹503.47 bought in sample packs against ₹245.44 bought by the kilogram.

The practical rule that falls out of the table: at 8%, a 500 gm bottle is a 6.25 kg batch and a 1 kg bottle is a 12.5 kg batch. If your festive plan is 30 candles of a scent at a 200 g fill, that is 6 kg of wax and 480 g of oil — the 500 gm pack, with 20 g spare. If it is 60 candles, the 1 kg pack. Anything smaller is a scent you are still testing, and testing is exactly what the 15 gm and 50 gm packs are for.

Two honest caveats on buying big. First, a kilogram of oil you do not use this season is working capital sitting on a shelf; CSI does not publish a shelf life for the fragrance oils, so if storage life matters to your plan, ask on WhatsApp rather than assuming. Second, several reviewers have said plainly that delivery charges on smaller orders feel high — consolidating a season's oil into one shipment is usually the better answer to that than splitting it across several small ones.

Four steps from a jar on the bench to a number of grams

That sequence is deliberately ordered. Makers who start from the wax bag — "I have 5 kg, how many candles is that" — end up pouring an awkward number of jars and mixing a leftover quantity of oil that fits nothing. Makers who start from the order, the jar and the fill weight order the right quantity of everything and finish with a clean shelf.

Working backwards: how far does one kilogram of oil go?

Sticker price on a fragrance oil tells you very little on its own. What matters is the cost of the grams that end up in one candle, and that depends on the load as much as on the bottle. A kilogram of oil at 6% scents 16.6 kg of wax; the same kilogram at 13% scents 7.7 kg. The bottle did not change — your yield halved.

Put that beside a retail price and the picture sharpens. If you sell a 200 g candle at ₹599.00, the fragrance in it at 8% with Citrus Lemon is ₹45.31 — under one tenth of the ticket. Moving that candle to 10% adds ₹11.33. The fragrance line is rarely what makes or breaks a candle costing in India; wax, jar, packaging and courier are all larger. That is worth knowing before you spend a fortnight optimising the wrong number.

What a kilogram of wax costs to scent, oil by oil

CSI's 1 kg oil prices run from around ₹2.89 a gram at the value end to well over ₹8.96 a gram on the concentrated and fine-fragrance pages. Because the gram table is fixed, that spread transfers directly into the cost of scenting a kilogram of wax. The table below shows the same three loads across ten in-stock oils, all at 1 kg pricing.

Two things fall out of that matrix. The first is that the cheapest oil at 10% (₹289.10 per kilogram of wax with Citronella) still costs less than the dearest oil at 6% (₹537.60 with Gilli Mitti Patchouli) — scent choice moves your costs far more than load choice does. The second is that a scent range priced as one line item is a fiction: if you sell six scents at one price, the margin on each is different, and it is different by a factor of three or four.

Scaling the number for Diwali and wedding season

Work the clock backwards. Soy container candles are usually judged after a 14–21 day cure, and the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page itself asks for a minimum of 48 hours and ideally one to two weeks before burn testing. Add courier time to the customer, and a Diwali candle wants to be poured by about mid-October. Add the days you need to actually make it, and the raw materials have to be on your bench in the first week of October at the latest — which makes the oil order a decision you take now, in September, with the gram table in front of you.

The interesting row is the last one. Across a 500-candle run, the whole distance from 6% to 8% is 2 kg of oil, or ₹6,136.00 with British Rose — ₹12.27 a candle. Against jars, printed boxes and courier, that is a small line. It is worth deciding on evidence rather than on nerves, but it is not the line that decides whether a festive run makes money.

Two Indian practicalities that change the quantities rather than the percentages. Heat: wax and oil sitting in a Nagpur or Ahmedabad store room through a 40°C week should be kept sealed and out of the sun, and oil bottles should be capped tightly between pours — the wax pages ask for cool, dry storage away from sunlight and moisture, and the same care suits the oils. Monsoon: in Mumbai, Kochi and Kolkata, keep flakes and chunks sealed so they do not take up moisture, and do not leave a part-used oil bottle open on a humid bench.

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