I Have 500 g of Lavender Fragrance Oil — How Many 200 g Candles Can I Produce if My Final Formula Uses 8% Fragrance?

The count: 500 g into 16 g doses

Every calculation in this series uses one convention: the fragrance load is a share of the finished candle weight. A 200 g candle at 8% is 16 g of oil plus 184 g of wax, and the two together weigh 200 g. That convention matters most on a page like this one, because it fixes the dose. If you measured the load as a share of the wax instead, the dose would change and so would the count. We show the two conventions side by side further down.

With the dose fixed at 16 g, the arithmetic is a single division. Here it is written out so you can check it, including the remainder most calculators leave out:

Two things in that table are easy to miss. First, the wax figure is 31 × 184 g, not 31 × 200 g. The second calculation over-buys wax by 496 g, exactly the weight of the oil, because the oil is already inside the 200 g. Second, the 4 g remainder is not waste. It is exactly the oil for one 50 g test pot at 8% (50 × 8% = 4 g), which is a useful place to put it: a retained sample from the same bottle as the production run. The 50-candle version of this calculation runs the same arithmetic in the buying direction.

The allowance ladder

Oil goes missing in every real pour. A film stays on the pouring jug, some coats the stirrer, a candle with a bad top gets remelted and some of its scent flashes off, and the last pour of the batch is often short. None of these losses is published as a figure for any wax or oil, so we use labelled working assumptions: 3% for a careful small batch, 5% for a typical one. Measure your own: weigh the oil before the batch, weigh what is left after, count the candles, and you have your real loss rate within a few runs.

The order matters. Take the test candles out of the bottle first, because they are a fixed quantity. Then budget each production candle at 16 g plus the loss percentage. Then round down to whole candles:

The title says final formula, which suggests the testing is finished. In that case the planning figure is 29 candles at a 5% allowance, and you may well pour 30 or 31 on a good day. The difference is a bonus, not a shortfall. If you are still choosing a wick or confirming the load, take the two test candles out first and plan on 27. Adding extra oil for testing covers the test allowance in more depth for a 100-candle run.

Matching wax, wicks and jars to the oil

Once the oil sets the count, everything else is bought to match it. Plan the batch at the same allowance as the oil, because pour loss takes wax and oil together: a spilled gram of candle mix is 0.92 g of wax and 0.08 g of oil. For 29 candles with a 5% allowance, the batch you melt and mix is 29 × 200 g × 1.05 = 6,090.0 g, made of 487.2 g of oil and 5,602.8 g of wax.

The wax bag rounding leaves you 397.2 g of spare wax, enough wax for two more candles but not the oil to go with them. Keep it for the next bottle. The jars come in packs of five, so 29 candles means 30 jars and one spare. The wick line buys three packs of 10 at ₹59.00, which is ₹5.90 a wick, the same rate as the larger packs. Wick size for the White Matte Glass Jar is not published: test one before the batch. The jar's fill weight is not published either, so confirm that 200 g sits where you want it with one weighed test pour. Estimating fill weight from a water fill shows the method.

Per candle, the material cost is ₹83.84 of lavender, ₹110.22 of wax (184 g at ₹599.00 a kilo), ₹5.90 for the wick and ₹70.80 for the jar: ₹270.76. That excludes labour, packaging, freight and GST, which belong in your own costing. The oil is 31.0% of the material cost, so the lavender is the second-largest line after the wax, ahead of the jar.

If your formula is not exactly 8%

An 8% load is this series' default for maths, not a verdict on lavender. Your final formula came from your own tests, and if it landed at 7% or 9% the count moves. Here is the same 500 g at nearby loads, with no allowance, so you can apply your own:

Each point of load is worth about four candles from this bottle. That is why the load belongs in the formula, decided by a burn test, and not adjusted on the day to stretch a bottle. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are rated up to 13% and Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 up to 10%. Those are the wax makers' stated formulation maximums, not targets, and CSI publishes no throw data for any oil at any load. The oud version of this page walks through the 6%, 8% and 10% decision on a full kilo.

One more trap sits here. If your 8% is measured against the wax rather than the finished candle, your dose is different. Under that convention a maker adds 8 g of oil per 100 g of wax, so 184 g of wax takes 14.72 g of oil and the candle weighs 198.72 g at a true load of 7.41%. The bottle then covers 33 candles, not 31, but they are lighter and weaker than the formula you tested. Pick one convention, write it on the formula card, and use it every time. CSI's pages use the finished-weight convention throughout.

Topping up to a round order

Suppose a customer asks for 50 lavender candles, not 29. At 16 g each with the same 5% allowance, 50 candles need 840 g of oil. You hold 500 g, so the shortfall is 340 g. The cheapest listed way to cover it is 3 × 100 g + 1 × 50 g of Lavender for ₹1,890.00, which gives 350 g. Buying a second 500 g at ₹2,620.00 covers it too and leaves 160 g for the next run. That choice depends on whether lavender is a proven seller for you, and the 500 g or 1 kg decision works through it with months of cover.

Where the count goes wrong

Most shortfalls on a fixed bottle come from four places. None of them is exotic, and each can be caught before the first pour.

The third source of error is the load drifting upwards. A maker who adds "a splash more" to the last few candles because the bottle is nearly empty ends up with inconsistent candles, some at 8% and some at 9%. The fourth is sampling from the production bottle. Every 4 g test pot you pour for a customer or a photo comes out of the same 500 g, so count them into the test allowance. Counting candles left in a partly used stock applies the same logic to 4 kg of a bestseller.

If you are planning several scents at once, run this calculation per bottle, not on the total. A 500 g lavender and a 500 g rose each make 31 candles at 8%. They do not make 62 lavender candles, however convenient the combined order looks on a spreadsheet. Splitting a 500-candle order between lavender, rose and oud shows the per-scent version, and a 70:30 lavender-vanilla blend shows what changes when two oils share one candle.

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