I'm Completely New to Candle Making and Want to Make 10 Test Candles — What Quantities of Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wicks and Jars Should I Buy Without Creating Leftover Stock?

The grams: ten candles at five sizes

Start with the arithmetic, because everything after it is just pack sizes. Fragrance load is a percentage of the finished candle, not of the wax, so a 120 g candle at 8% is 110.4 g of wax plus 9.6 g of oil, and ten of them are 1,104 g and 96 g. That convention matters: if you calculated the load as a share of the wax instead, you would be buying about 89 g of oil for the same ten candles. Both conventions exist and CSI's Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page phrases its range as a share of total wax weight — this series uses the finished-candle convention throughout and says so.

Two conclusions fall straight out. First, the 150 g and 200 g plans fit the ladder better than the 120 g plan, which is counter-intuitive — bigger candles, less waste — and happens purely because 1,380 g and 1,840 g sit close under a pack boundary. Second, if you are committed to 120 g jars, the leftover problem is solved not by buying differently but by pouring nine. Nine is not a compromise; it is the number the packs were going to give you anyway. This series also assumes a 3–5% wastage allowance for what stays in the pot and on the spatula when you are planning production quantities — which, for a nine-jar test, is roughly the 6.4 g the table leaves you.

Where the pack ladder actually lands

Now the four ladders side by side, because "without leftover stock" is really four separate questions with four different answers. Two of the four lines can be bought to the exact quantity you need. One can be bought to the gram only by accident. And one simply cannot, because its smallest in-stock pack is larger than a ten-candle test.

The leftover-free build, line by line

Here is the whole order. Nine 120 g candles, one scent, one wick size, priced at CSI's listed September 2026 figures. The right-hand column is the honest part: what is left when the ninth jar is poured, valued at the same prices you paid.

Look at where the ₹133.19 sits. More than half of it is wick stickers — a consumable that does not age, costs ₹2.50 each and will be used by your second batch. The genuinely idle money is the 13.6 g of oil, ₹46.54, and even that is a top-up for a tenth candle later. Total unrecoverable waste in this build is 6.4 g of wax, worth ₹3.25. That is what "without leftover stock" looks like in practice: not zero, but small enough to ignore and entirely accounted for.

What the tenth candle really costs

Sometimes ten is the right number — five candles on each of two wick sizes, or five of each of two scents, is a cleaner experiment than nine of anything. So price it honestly rather than pretending nine is always better.

That last row is the answer to the question as asked. The tenth candle costs ₹104.61; the pack ladder costs ₹202.59. If you will pour again within a month, the 396 g is not dead stock at all — it is three more jars of the wax you just proved, and buying it now saves a delivery later. If you are genuinely unsure whether candle making is for you, pour nine and spend the ₹307.20 on nothing. Both answers are defensible; what is not defensible is buying 1.5 kg without knowing which of the two you chose.

One scent or two? The ₹40.20 question

The temptation with ten candles is to run two scents of five. Price it first: one 100 g bottle of British Rose is ₹342.20, while a 50 g bottle of British Rose plus a 50 g bottle of Citrus Lemon is ₹382.40 — so the second scent costs ₹40.20 and leaves you two part-used bottles instead of one nearly-empty one. That is not much money. The real cost is elsewhere.

With ten candles and one scent you can run five on each of two wick sizes and read the wick result twice — day 7 and day 14 — with a spare. With two scents you get two or three jars per wick per scent, and if one of them tunnels you cannot tell whether the wick was small or the oil was heavy. At the first-batch stage the wick is the unknown that matters, and the wick needs replication, not variety. Test one scent properly, then keep the jar, wax, load, wick and cure identical and change only the oil next time — that is a one-variable test, and it costs one more 100 g bottle.

The one leftover you cannot avoid

Every line in this order can be bought close to exactly except the wicks, and it is worth being precise about why. Eco Candle Wicks are priced flat per piece at ₹5.90 for C1 and ₹9.44 for C2 across every pack size from ten to a thousand — so there is no volume reward and no reason to buy deep. But the C2 10-pack is currently sold out, which makes twenty the smallest C2 quantity you can order. If your test brackets two wick sizes across ten candles, you use five of each and hold fifteen spare, worth ₹171.10 at listed prices.

There is no clever way around that, and you should not try to find one. Running a single wick size to avoid the leftover is a false economy: the wick is the variable you most need to learn, no CSI wick page states a jar diameter, and a bracket of two sizes in identical jars is the only honest way to find yours. Spare wicks of a size that worked are the most useful stock in the cupboard. Spare wicks of a size you never tested are the least. The difference is a burn test, not a purchase.

Frequently asked questions