I'm Making a 1 Kg Soy Wax Batch at 8% Fragrance Load — Do I Add 80 g Fragrance Oil to 1 Kg Wax or Should the 8% be Calculated from the Total Finished Candle Weight?

Two bases for one percentage

Candle makers use two bases, often without noticing which one they have picked. The first is the finished candle: the oil is 8% of everything in the jar once wax and oil are combined. The second is the wax: you weigh the wax, then add oil equal to 8% of that wax weight. Both are written as “8%”. They produce different candles.

CSI uses the first base everywhere in this series and in earlier guides: oil = W × L and wax = W − oil, where W is the finished weight and L is the load. A 200 g candle at 8% is 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. A 1,000 g batch at 8% is 80 g of oil and 920 g of wax. The reason is practical. The customer buys a candle of a stated weight, the jar holds a fixed weight, and the wax maker's stated maximum — up to 13% for Luxury Soy Wax Chunks and up to 10% for Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 — is most usefully read as a share of the finished blend. When everything is expressed against the finished weight, a 10% candle in one jar size is the same formula as a 10% candle in another.

Read across the 8% row. The CSI convention gives 80 g of oil in 920 g of wax. Adding 8% of a kilo of wax (80 g) to that full kilo gives a true 7.41%. Keeping the kilo of wax and hitting a genuine 8% needs 86.96 g. The gap widens as the load climbs: at 13%, adding 130 g to a kilo of wax is only 11.50% of the finished candle, and the correct figure is 149.43 g. That matters most for anyone quoting a load back to a supplier or comparing results with another maker.

The conversion formula

Most of the time you know one of two things: how much finished candle you want, or how much wax you have. Each has its own formula, and both deliver the same true load.

The 1 kg batch, worked to the gram

The first row is the clean answer when you want exactly five 200 g candles. You weigh 920 g of wax out of the 1 kg bag, melt it, and add 80 g of oil. Each candle then holds 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. The 80 g of wax left in the bag is not waste: it is a test pot, or the start of the next batch. The third row is the answer when you want to use the whole bag: you get 1,086.96 g of candle — five full 200 g jars plus 86.96 g for a small test pot — at a true 8%.

For the five-candle batch, the material cost per 200 g candle is 16 g of Lavender at ₹5.40/g (₹86.40), 184 g of Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at ₹0.60/g (₹110.22), one Eco Candle Wicks Thin C1 (₹5.90) and one White Matte Glass Jar (₹70.80): ₹273.32. That excludes labour, packaging, freight and GST, which you add in your own costing.

Every row is the same formula, so every row is the same candle. That is the payoff of the finished-weight convention: a 500 g half-batch (40 g oil + 460 g wax) tests exactly the recipe you will later pour at 5 kg. If you need the production-scale version with melter loads and pour-loss planning, I'm Making 10 Kg of Scented Candles at 8% Fragrance Load — How Do I Calculate the Exact Wax and Fragrance Quantities Without Accidentally Making a 10.8 Kg Batch? owns it.

Why the base changes your results

Half a percentage point sounds trivial. In three situations it is not.

Near a ceiling. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are rated up to 13% and CSI 464 up to 10%. Those are the wax makers' stated formulation maximums, not regulatory limits and not targets. A maker who adds “10% of wax” to CSI 464 is actually at 9.09% of total, under the ceiling. A maker who adds 11% of the finished weight to CSI 464 is over it. When you are working near a stated maximum, the base decides whether you are inside or outside it. My Soy Wax Supplier Says the Wax Can Hold 12% Fragrance Oil — Does That Mean I Should Actually Use 12% for the Strongest Hot Throw? covers why the maximum is rarely the best load anyway.

In side-by-side tests. A 6% / 8% / 10% ladder mixed on the “% of wax” base is really 5.66% / 7.41% / 9.09%. The steps are uneven and every rung is lower than labelled. If you are trying to work out why an 8% candle smelled stronger than a 10% candle, the first thing to rule out is the arithmetic.

When you talk to anyone else. Suppliers, other makers and a production helper all need the same number. “8% of total” can be reproduced by anyone with a scale. “8%” alone cannot.

None of this touches performance. Whether your Lavender throws well at 8% depends on the wax, the wick, the melt pool, the cure and the room — not on which way you wrote the percentage. What the base controls is whether the number in your notebook matches the candle on your table. If a candle smells weak, the order of checks is in I'm Using 6% Fragrance Load but My Candle Smells Weak — Should I Immediately Increase It to 10% or Troubleshoot the Wick and Wax First?; if more oil made it worse, I Reduced My Fragrance Load from 10% to 8% and the Candle Suddenly Burns Better — How Can Less Fragrance Sometimes Produce Better Overall Performance? explains the usual mechanisms.

What to buy for the batch

The batch on this page is deliberately small: one bag of wax, one bottle of oil, five jars. It is the cheapest way to prove your arithmetic and your process before you scale. Here are the three products it is built on.

Plan 3–5% extra for pour loss and test burns — a working assumption, not a measured figure. On this batch the spare 80 g of wax and 20 g of oil already covers that. The wick is an example only: the right wick for your jar diameter is not something a table can promise, so burn-test it. If the first candle tunnels or floods, My Candle Smells Strong at 10% Fragrance Load but the Wick Struggles — How Do I Determine Whether Reducing Fragrance or Increasing Wick Size Is the Better Solution? walks through whether the fix is the wick or the load.

Frequently asked questions