How to Calculate Fragrance Oil Cost Per Candle

Grams before rupees: turning a load into a weight

CSI's wax and oil pages both state fragrance loads as a percentage of total wax weight. The arithmetic that follows is deliberately dull: oil grams = wax grams × load. Two hundred grams of wax at 8% takes 16 g of oil, and the finished candle weighs 216 g. If instead you start from a finished weight — a jar you sell as a 200 g candle — the wax is 200 ÷ 1.08 and the oil is about 14.8 g. Both are defensible; mixing them inside one sheet is not.

Write the convention at the top of your recipe card and again at the top of your cost sheet. The gap between the two readings of "8% of a 200 g candle" is only about 1.2 g of oil, which is ₹3.64 on British Rose and ₹9.06 on Vanilla Bean — invisible on one candle, and the reason a kilo runs out three weeks early on a range that pours 500 candles a month.

That last row is the one to keep near your melter. Every kilo of wax you melt needs 80 g of oil at 8% — so a 1 kg pack of fragrance covers 12.5 kg of wax, which on CSI 464 is about 62 candles of 200 g. Buy your oil packs against wax kilos, not against a feeling about how often you reach for a bottle.

The rate belongs to the pack, not to the scent

Fragrance per-gram rates fall harder with pack size than wax rates do. British Rose is ₹6.29 a gram in the 15 gm bottle, ₹4.25 at 50 gm, ₹3.42 at 100 gm, ₹3.19 at 500 gm and ₹3.07 at 1 kg. That is roughly a halving between the smallest and the largest pack, and it lands directly on every candle: ₹100.69 of scent versus ₹49.09 for the same 16 g.

Two things in that table are worth saying out loud. The 15 gm bottle cannot dose a single 200 g candle at 8% — it is a sampling size, priced like one, and costing a production candle at 15 gm rates makes a viable product look unviable. And the step from 500 gm to 1 kg is small: ₹1.89 a candle. If cash or shelf life is tight, two 500 gm packs bought two months apart cost you very little more than the kilo and leave you far less exposed to a scent that stops selling.

What 16 g of scent costs, oil by oil

Everything below is the same candle: a 200 g wax fill at 8% of wax weight, 16 g of oil, priced at each oil's 1 kg rate. The usage column is quoted from each product page — where a page states a range, the lower of that range and your wax's ceiling is your real cap.

The spread is the story. At 8%, the scent line runs from ₹45.31 on Citrus Lemon to ₹122.34 on Vanilla Bean and ₹384.90 on the Club De Nuit Intense inspired oil — a difference of ₹339.58 on one candle, against a wax line of ₹101.48 for the whole 200 g of CSI 464. Choosing Lavender over Citrus Lemon costs ₹38.22 a candle, ₹1,911.20 over fifty. None of that makes the dearer oil wrong; it makes it a pricing decision rather than a preference.

What this page will not do is rank those oils by throw per rupee. CSI does not publish comparative strength data and we will not invent it — some pages state a range starting at 6%, some at 7%, some simply give a maximum, and how a given oil performs in your wax, your jar and your wick is a test-burn question, not a costing question. Cost the grams you pour; decide the grams somewhere else.

Two ceilings, and the lower one is yours

Every scented candle has two stated maximums. The wax page gives one — Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 up to 10% of total wax weight, Luxury Soy Wax Chunks and Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 up to 13%, while Eco Soy CSI 400 does not publish one at all. The oil page gives the other — Fresh Strawberries states 6–9% of total wax weight, Roasted Coffee 6–10% for soy, Vanilla Bean up to 10% for soy. The lower of the two governs. These are the manufacturers' stated formulation maximums, not rules imposed by anyone else, and MSDS and IFRA documentation is available on request.

Costing at the ceiling is a useful discipline even if you pour below it, because it gives you the worst case your price has to survive. On a 200 g candle in Chunks with Roasted Coffee, the scent line at the 10% cap is ₹74.76 against ₹59.81 at 8% — a difference of ₹14.95 a candle. If your retail price only works at 8%, you have no headroom to answer a customer who says the scent is faint, and that is a pricing problem disguised as a formulation one.

The grams that never reach the wax

Wax residue costs you around half a rupee a gram. Fragrance residue costs three to eight, and on the premium end far more. The film left in a measuring beaker, the drops on the pipette, the last of a bottle you cannot tip out and the batch you scrapped after a bad pour all belong in the fragrance line, not in a shrug.

There is no CSI figure for decanting loss and this page will not invent one. As a worked assumption, take 2%: a 16 g dose becomes 16.32 g drawn from the bottle, which on British Rose moves the line from ₹49.09 to ₹50.07 and adds ₹49.09 across fifty candles. On Vanilla Bean the same 2% is ₹122.34 over fifty. Measure yours the same way you measure wax: weigh the bottle at the start of a month, weigh it at the end, divide the difference by the candles poured, and compare that with the recipe.

A fifty-candle scent budget, and the kilo question

Fifty 200 g candles at 8% need 800 g of one scent, plus an allowance. At British Rose's 1 kg rate the oil drawn is ₹2,454.40; at 50 gm packs it would be ₹3,398.40, a difference of ₹944.00 for the identical candles. The kilo costs ₹3,068.00 on the day and leaves about 200 g on the shelf — ₹613.60 of stock, not a loss, and enough for another twelve candles.

Charge it two ways, exactly as with wax. Consumption costing puts ₹49.09 on each candle and carries the remaining 200 g as inventory. Pack costing charges the whole bottle to the run: ₹3,068.00 ÷ 50 = ₹61.36 a candle. Consumption costing is the one to price from; pack costing is the one your bank balance experiences in the week you order. A brand that quotes wholesale off pack costing usually walks away from orders it could profitably take.

Now the range question, which is where scent budgets actually break. Five scents across the same fifty candles means ten candles each, 160 g of each oil — and a kilo of any one of them would sit for six months. A six-scent range in 50 gm packs is ₹1,331.98 and gives you roughly three 200 g candles per scent; the same range in 100 gm packs is ₹2,424.16 for about six each. Narrow ranges get the kilo rate. Wide ranges pay the sample rate on every candle. That trade-off is worth costing before it is worth debating.

Five checks before the scent line goes into your price

One: is the load a percentage of wax weight? That is the convention CSI's pages use, and mixing it with percentage-of-candle drifts your grams. Two: is the rate from the pack you buy, not the pack you once bought? Sample-size rates make real candles look unaffordable. Three: is the cap the lower of the two stated ceilings? A 13% wax with a 6–9% oil is a 9% candle. Four: is there a wastage allowance and is it labelled an assumption? Five: does the bottle reconcile? Grams gone ÷ candles poured, monthly.

Run those five and the fragrance line becomes the most predictable number on your sheet — which matters, because it is usually the second largest material line after wax and the one that changes most between two products in the same catalogue. On a 200 g candle in CSI 464 with an Eco Candle Wick Thin (C1) at ₹5.90, wax and wick together are ₹107.38; British Rose at 8% adds ₹49.09 on top of that, and Vanilla Bean would add ₹122.34. Same jar, same wick, same wax — and a different business.

Two things this page leaves for elsewhere. It does not choose the scent or argue about throw; the fragrance guides own that, and your own burn tests settle it. And it does not price your outer packaging, labels, courier or labour, because CSI does not sell them — those are rows you fill from your own invoices. What CSI can quote, on WhatsApp and with a GST invoice, is the kilo rate for the scents you have already proven.

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