making candles from the old lot. Quarantine the new bag, run a blind sniff of both melts, and check whether any difference survives your lightest fragrance. 6 picks

Normal, stop, or neither?

Unscented soy wax is not odourless. It carries a faint, slightly fatty, sometimes nutty or waxy smell that comes from the vegetable oil it was made from and from how it was refined. That base note shifts a little from one production run to the next, and many makers only notice it for the first time when a new bag smells different from the one they have been working with for months.

A slightly different smell is therefore within the range of normal. It becomes a real finding when the difference has a character — rancid, sour, burnt, solvent-like, smoky, musty — rather than just an intensity, or when it is strong enough to show through your finished candles. The goods-in job is to find out which of those you have, quickly, without guessing.

Keep producing with the previous lot while you do it. Put a quarantine label on the new bag, move it off the production shelf, and treat the next hour as an incoming inspection rather than a crisis. If the old lot is finished and the new bag is all you have, hold the orders that use your lightest fragrances until the check below is done; darker, heavier blends are far less exposed.

Run a blind sniff of melted old and new lot

Cold flakes release very little odour, and your nose adapts within seconds, so sniffing into two open bags tells you almost nothing. Melted wax is the fair test, because warm wax releases its volatile components the same way a burning candle does. And the test has to be blind, because once you believe the new bag smells different, you will smell a difference whether one exists or not.

This is sometimes called a triangle test, and its strength is that it does not ask anyone to name the difference first. It only asks whether a difference can be found without knowing which cup is which. That keeps a nervous maker from rejecting a perfectly good bag, and it keeps an optimistic one from waving through a lot that genuinely smells off.

What the smell might be telling you

If the blind test finds the new lot, the next question is what kind of difference it is. Describe it in plain words before you look at the table below, so the table does not put words in your nose.

Notice the middle column. Goods-in inspection rarely proves a cause. It gives you enough evidence to make a sensible decision and a sensible question for the supplier. That is all it needs to do.

Could a base odour show through a light fragrance?

This is the commercial question behind the title. A faint difference in unscented wax matters very little under a strong gourmand, oud or vanilla at the upper end of its load. It matters far more under a fresh, clean or citrus fragrance at a modest load, because those oils have volatile top notes and leave less cover once they flash off. CSI's Citrus Lemon product page makes the point itself: citrus top notes are volatile and fade faster than warmer families.

So the second test is a scented pair using your most exposed product. Pick the lightest oil you sell at its lowest load, make one candle from each lot, cure them identically, and compare cold throw and then hot throw blind, with the same triangle method. Anything warmer and heavier than that oil will be less exposed than your worst case.

Worked example: the citrus pair

Suppose your lightest line is a 200 g Citrus Lemon candle at 6%, calculated on total candle weight. Each candle is 200 × 0.06 = 12 g of oil and 200 − 12 = 188 g of wax. A pair, one per lot, uses 24 g of oil and 376 g of wax.

Bought as the 50 g pack at ₹170.00, the oil costs ₹170.00 ÷ 50 = ₹3.40 per gram, so 24 × ₹3.40 = ₹81.60. The wax, if it is CSI 464 at ₹507.40 per kg, is 0.376 × ₹507.40 = ₹190.78. Together that is ₹81.60 + ₹190.78 = ₹272.38 of materials, plus two jars and wicks you already have. Cure both for the product page's stated 48–72 hours as a minimum, and as a suggested starting point sniff again at day 7.

If three people cannot pick the new-lot candle out blind in either cold or hot throw, the odour difference has no commercial effect on your most exposed product, and it will have none on the heavier ones either. That is a clear, cheap basis for releasing the bag.

The decision, the record, and the supplier question

Put the outcome into one of four boxes. Accept when the blind sniff cannot find the new lot, or finds only a slightly stronger normal wax note that disappears under your lightest scented candle. Conditional release when the unscented difference is detectable but does not show through the citrus pair — release it to your heavier fragrance lines first and keep sniffing. Quarantine anything sour, solvent-like, musty or burnt that survives a careful re-melt, until the supplier has answered. Reject when the off-odour shows through finished candles.

Your record should hold the date received, product, invoice number, bag weight, which sniffers took part, how many correct picks out of how many rounds, the one-word descriptions, the scented-pair result and the decision. It takes five minutes to write and it turns a vague "this bag smells funny" into something a supplier can act on.

When you do contact the supplier, send the description and your blind-test score rather than just "it smells wrong". For CSI that is on WhatsApp at +91 7397976926. CSI's wax pages publish no odour specification, so there is no published figure to measure against; ask what they can tell you, write the answer on the lot record, and keep a sealed portion of the new lot as the next reference. If the lot has genuinely failed, send it back as a question whoever the supplier is — including us — rather than burying it in a blend where the next customer complaint will be impossible to trace.

Where this page fits

CSI already has guides that cover parts of this question. This page covers the goods-in check for the question above; these go deeper on the rest:

Three things to buy for this job

Frequently asked questions