How Much Fragrance Oil Should I Use in Tealight Candles?

Grams per tealight at every load

This series uses one convention throughout: load is a percentage of the total finished weight, so oil = total × load and wax = total − oil. We use illustrative tealight fills of 12 g and 15 g because CSI lists no tealight cup and there is no published fill to work from. The table shows each load up to 13%, with a plain yes or no for each of the two waxes whose makers publish a ceiling.

Read the table from the 8% rows outward. For most tealight tests 8% is the sensible start: 0.96 g in a 12 g tealight, 1.20 g in a 15 g. Drop to 6% if a scent is strong enough there or crowds a small room; go to 10% if a fair test says it helps. The 12% and 13% rows exist because Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are rated up to 13%, but a ceiling is not a recommendation. In a tealight, where the pool is small and the burn short, extra oil above what the wick can burn cleanly is commonly where soot and flicker begin — general practice, and a reason to test rather than assume.

If your cup holds something other than 12 g or 15 g, the arithmetic is the same. The table below gives the grams for other fills, labelled as "if your cup holds", since none of these is a published size either. The last column is how many tealights of that fill one 1 kg bottle of oil scents at 8%.

Why the wax sets the limit, not the tealight

Makers often ask for "the maximum fragrance for tealights" as if the format had its own number. It does not. The limit on how much oil a candle can hold is set by the wax's formulation, and only two waxes in this series come with a stated figure: Luxury Soy Wax Chunks up to 13% and CSI 464 up to 10%. These are the wax makers' formulation maximums — how much oil the wax is designed to bind — not regulatory limits and not a promise of stronger scent at the top.

For every other wax CSI lists — Natural Soy Pearl Wax, Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468, Fully Refined Paraffin Wax Pellets and the rest — no ceiling is in our data. That does not mean they have none; it means we will not invent one. Check the wax's product page or ask CSI on WhatsApp for the wax maker's stated maximum, and until you have it, keep tealight tests in the 6–10% range as a labelled starting point, not a specification.

The oil has limits too. Each fragrance oil has its own usage guidance, set out in its IFRA certificate for the product category. We do not publish individual oils' IFRA percentages or flash points on this page, and you should not rely on anyone who quotes them without the document. Ask CSI on WhatsApp for the IFRA certificate of each oil you use; it is the reference, not a blog table. Fragrance load in coconut soy wax and fragrance oil in paraffin wax cover the same question for other waxes.

The %-of-wax trap

Many makers learn to dose fragrance as a percentage of the wax — weigh 1 kg of wax, add 8% of that, 80 g. That is a different recipe from an 8% load as a share of the finished candle. In the first method the finished batch weighs 1,080 g, and the oil is 7.41% of it. For a true 8% load on 1 kg of wax, you need 86.96 g of oil, making a 1,086.96 g batch. The difference is small, but it compounds when you compare your results with a guide, a supplier's ceiling or another maker's recipe.

Why it matters for ceilings: CSI 464 is rated up to 10%. If you dose "12% of the wax", you have added 120 g to 1 kg and the oil is 10.71% of the total — above the ceiling, even though "12%" of the wax sounds like it might be fine in one reading and not the other. Pick one convention, write it on your batch card and stick to it. Every figure in this cluster uses percent of total.

Weigh the batch, not the tealight

Dosing 0.96 g into each cup is slow and inaccurate: a kitchen scale that reads in whole grams cannot tell 0.96 g from 1.4 g. The reliable method is to make the whole batch at the target load, then pour. The table gives oil and wax for three batch sizes at 6%, 8% and 10%, with how many 12 g and 15 g tealights each batch fills.

Load is one decision among several. Which oil to load comes first — the tealight shortlist covers that — and which bottle to buy it in follows, in Buy Fragrance Oils for Tealight Candle Making. If your range includes votives, Buy Fragrance Oils for Votive Candle Making applies these grams to real, priced jars, and Where to Buy Fragrance Oils for Commercial Tealight and Votive Production covers sourcing every component for a commercial line.

What each step of load costs

Load is a performance choice first, but it has a price. Using Apple Cinnamon at its 100 g rate (₹4.74 a gram) as the example, here is what 6%, 8% and 10% put into one 12 g tealight, with wax in both published-ceiling waxes. Cups and wicks are excluded because CSI did not list them.

Each two-point step in load adds ₹1.14 of Apple Cinnamon to a 12 g tealight — ₹1,138.46 per thousand. That is not nothing on a festive run, and it is money wasted if the extra oil does not show in a blind burn. Strong oils for small tealights sets out the two-arm test that tells you whether 10% earns its place over 8% for a given oil.

For the step up in size, best fragrance oils for votive candles works the same load maths for 50 g and 70 g votives, and the Velvet jar's published 50 g capacity. For turning per-piece grams into a production order, go to Bulk Fragrance Oils for Scented Tealight Production, and for the wax-melt version of this question, how much fragrance oil to use in wax melts.

Frequently asked questions