My Candle Has Five Fragrances but Only Two Soot — Should I Change the Wick Only for Those Two Formulas?

Your situation, made precise

The worked example, labelled: a five-fragrance range in one jar, every candle 200 g at 8% (16 g of oil and 184 g of wax, load as a percentage of total weight), all on Eco C2. Lavender, Jasmine and Blue Ocean burn cleanly through the jar. Cinnamon Vanilla and Dark Vanilla Oud soot by about the third hour of a four-hour burn, with a mushroom on the wick. You don't want to retire a wick that works for 60% of your range, and you don't want to run two kinds of wick if you can help it.

This is the predictable version of a rule the series keeps meeting: a wick is approved for a formula, not for a jar. How to test candidates in the production formula in the first place is the production-fragrance test; why the same wick can be fine with lavender and huge with vanilla is 6914. This post owns the decision for the two failures and what it does to your stock room. What to do later, when one formula in an approved range changes, is avoiding a whole-collection re-test.

Why only two of five soot: causes, ranked

The ranking is our judgement for the pattern "same wick, same jar, same load; two formulas soot, three don't". Signs are common observations, not CSI burn data; no CSI oil page gives wick or soot data in the text we captured.

Cause 1 is the usual answer for exactly this pattern: the two sooting formulas in the worked example are the two whose pages describe vanilla-forward compositions (Cinnamon Vanilla's page states "Vanillin content 2.5%"), and vanilla-rich, dark gourmand and resinous oils commonly build more carbon than lavender or a fresh aquatic. That is a tendency, not a rule, which is why the test decides. The published post on this exact pattern is mushrooming only with dark gourmand fragrances; the series' soot diagnosis is the soot hub. Cause 3 is worth five minutes with your batch sheets: a range that drifted to 10% in its gourmands is a different problem, solved on the formula side (optimising load separately for lavender and vanilla).

Change two, change all five, or change the formula?

Option B deserves a fair hearing, because one wick is genuinely easier to run and the published standardisation method is reducing wick SKUs without forcing every fragrance into one size. The catch is that the three clean formulas were approved on C2 because C2 reached the glass in them; C1 might not. If C1 tunnels in Lavender, option B is dead and you've learned it for nine candles. Option C is the formula-side route: it keeps one wick and changes what you sell, and the scent consequence has to be tested, not assumed. Within a CSI wick range there is no half-size between C1 and C2, so if C1 tunnels in the vanilla formulas too, option C or a different construction is all that's left: the cluster hub lays out those between-sizes options (6981).

The test plan: twelve candles, two formulas

Two wick SKUs: quantities, cash and reorder points

Worked example, labelled: 500 candles a month, of which Lavender 120, Jasmine 80 and Blue Ocean 100 stay on C2 (300 candles) and Cinnamon Vanilla 110 and Dark Vanilla Oud 90 move to C1 (200 candles). Each SKU is calculated on its own: wicks = candles × wicks per candle × (1 + a 2% allowance, labelled), rounded up to whole CSI packs.

Option A happens to cost ₹590.00 a month less than today, because C1 is ₹3.54 a wick cheaper than C2. That's a side effect of the soot fix, and we'd say the same if it cost more. What two SKUs really change is the stock control. Each needs its own reorder point (daily use × your lead time + safety stock). Worked example, labelled: 25 production days a month and a 10-day lead time that is yours to measure (CSI publishes none; ask on WhatsApp), with five days' use held as safety stock (our judgement). C2: 12 a day, reorder at 180. C1: 8 a day, reorder at 120. On this simple method the two reorder points add up to the single one you would have with one wick (300). In practice each SKU's demand is lumpier than the combined demand (a corporate order for one vanilla formula, say), so each needs its own buffer watched separately, and many makers end up holding a little more in total. Pooled safety stock for a wick shared across several products is 6997; the full quantity formula is 6999.

Labelling and handling so the wrong wick never ships

Two Eco wicks from one listing differ by a word on the pack and a little thickness. The failure mode is obvious: a C2 in a Cinnamon Vanilla candle soots exactly as before, and nobody finds out until a customer does. The controls are boring, which is why they work:

The spare wick taped to each batch sheet doubles as a retained sample: if a complaint comes back, you know which wick and which pack went into that batch. What to keep, and for how long, is 6995. A wick lot from a different supplier later is a change for every formula that uses it, and the published post on testing a supplier change across a range is one wick across eight fragrances.

What to buy, and what to skip

Four items, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 7 October 2026. CSI publishes no flame, soot or wick data for any oil or wick, so nothing is ranked on performance.

Skip for now: Cotton Braided for these two formulas (it is a rung up from C2, and the problem is too much flame); new oils for the three clean formulas; and any production pack of either wick before the twelve candles have burned to the end.

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