Should My Wax Qualification Scorecard Include Glass Adhesion, Smooth Tops, Frosting, Sinkholes, Hot Throw, Burn Performance, Heat Stability and Production Labour?

Yes — but as gates and weights, written before you test

Glass adhesion, smooth tops, frosting, sinkholes, hot throw, burn performance, heat stability and production labour all belong on a wax qualification scorecard — each one is something your customer or your workshop pays for. But putting eight lines in a table and adding them up is how scorecards go wrong. Some criteria are not trade-offs at all: a wax that burns with a bigger flame or a hotter jar than your approved control, or cannot hold your fragrance load within its stated ceiling, or sags in your logged storage place, is out, however beautiful its glass looks. Those become gates, checked first, pass or fail. Everything else is weighted by what your brand actually sells.

The weights are where most of the honesty lives. A luxury clear-glass brand that photographs every candle against a white wall should weight adhesion and smooth tops heavily. An ecommerce brand shipping across India in May should weight heat stability far more. Same tests, same jars, different winners — which is fine, as long as the weights were written down before the first jar was poured. Weights chosen after you have seen the results are not weights; they are a way to ratify the wax you already liked.

The worked example uses the series default candle — 150 g in CSI's Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid (150 gram), 12 g of Gardenia and 138 g of wax at 8% — and two candidate waxes against your control: Luxury Soy Wax Chunks and Natural Soy Pearl Wax. CSI publishes no adhesion, frosting, throw, burn or heat data for any of its waxes, and no wax is declared better here. The scores in the weighting example below belong to hypothetical candidates A and B, invented to show how weights work; they are not results for any CSI wax.

The three gates

Safe burn. A wax change can change how the candle burns with the same wick, so the burn candles are compared line by line with the control: flame height, flicker, soot, mushrooming, the temperature of the jar side, and whether the pool runs too deep. CSI publishes no numeric flame-height or jar-temperature limit and we will not give one; the gate is "no worse than the approved control on every safety line, and within your jar supplier's guidance and the candle fire-safety standard you work to". A hotter jar is never traded for better adhesion or throw.

Load within the ceiling. Your production load must sit at or below the wax's stated maximum. CSI's pages state 13% for Chunks and CSI 468 and 10% for CSI 464; Natural Soy Pearl's page publishes no ceiling, so ask CSI on WhatsApp for the wax maker's figure before you rely on it. If your line runs at 11% today, CSI 464 fails this gate before any jar is poured. Optimising load before replacing the wax covers that trade.

Storage survival. A clear-glass candle that sags, sweats or softens in your warmest logged storage place is out. This gate uses the three heat-hold jars per arm and the temperatures you actually measured — not a temperature from a wax page. Only CSI 468 publishes a melting point (50–53°C), and a higher melt point does not by itself mean better heat survival; the storage-hold post runs the month.

The eight weighted criteria and how to measure each

Each criterion is scored 0–4 against the control: 2 means "same as our approved wax", 3 and 4 better, 1 and 0 worse. Scoring against the control rather than against an absolute ideal does two things. It cancels out the room, the season and the scorer's mood, because the control sat beside the candidate through all of them. And it makes the scorecard answer the real question — is this wax better than what I already have? — rather than an abstract one.

Nine jars per arm is enough because jars do more than one job. All nine are photographed for adhesion, tops, frosting and sinkholes through the cure and the cycle. Then three are burned for burn performance, three are used for the blind throw panel, and three are held in your warmest logged place for the storage gate and heat stability. That is the same jar count as a dedicated adhesion screen plus a little, not four separate test rounds. The jar-count post explains why nine per arm is still a screen for adhesion, not a final verdict.

Choosing the weights — and watching them change the winner

Weights express what your customer pays for. Two example sets are drawn in the diagram above, and both sum to 100%. The luxury clear-glass set puts 25% on adhesion and 15% on smooth tops because the candle is judged through the glass before it is lit. The pan-India ecommerce set moves 20% onto heat stability because the same candle will spend days in courier vans and warehouses. Neither set is a recommendation; they are labelled examples of how two different businesses might reason. Write yours, with a sentence explaining each weight, and sign it.

On the luxury weights, hypothetical candidate A wins 2.70 to 2.45: its adhesion and tops carry the day. On the pan-India weights, candidate B wins 2.75 to 2.30, because its heat stability now counts four times as much. Nothing about the candles changed. This is why weights must be fixed before testing, and why two brands can test the same waxes honestly and choose differently. If your weighted scores land within a few hundredths of each other, treat it as a tie and decide on the single criterion your brand cares about most — usually the one your customers complain about.

Putting production labour into rupees

Labour is the one criterion that converts directly into monthly cost, so price it rather than score it by feel. The figures below are labelled examples: a labour rate of ₹120.00 an hour and minutes per step that you replace with your own stopwatch timings. Multiply by a labelled example volume of 1,000 candles a month.

Compare that with the material difference between candidates. In this candle, at 5 kg wax rates and the 1 kg Gardenia rate, with an example Eco Thin C1 wick at ₹5.90 and the ₹94.40 jar, a Chunks candle carries ₹234.95 of CSI materials and a Natural Soy Pearl candle ₹210.91 — a difference of ₹24.04 a candle (Natural Soy Pearl prices are CSI live pricing, re-checked 1 October 2026). One extra heat-gun pass at the example timing costs ₹3.00. Labour can easily outweigh the wax price difference, which is why it belongs on the scorecard. Comparing Wax A and Wax B by cost per acceptable candle brings materials, rejects and labour into one figure.

The priced scorecard kit

Here is the two-candidate scorecard round priced with listed, in-stock CSI packs. Nine jars per arm, three arms, 27 jars — three packs of 10 with three spare for weighed fill checks and sinkhole probing. Each CSI arm needs 1,279.3 g of wax with a 3% pour-loss working allowance. The Gardenia covers all three arms including your control, so the oil is constant.

Pour each wax by its own page. Chunks: fragrance at 80–90°C, pour 75–80°C (spec table; the page's steps also show 70–80°C), stir two minutes, cure at least 48 hours, ideally one to two weeks. Natural Soy Pearl publishes no temperatures — follow the wax maker's instructions and ask CSI on WhatsApp. The Clear 150 g jar's page states hot pour up to 85°C. Clean every jar with the IPA spray and let it dry completely; it is flammable, so keep it away from the melter.

The decision rule

Apply from the top. Notice that a high weighted score never leads straight to a bulk purchase: the scorecard round is still small, and your acceptance plan needs a pilot to test. What the scorecard does is make sure the wax going into the pilot is the right one for your business, not merely the one with the cleanest glass.

The CSI products in this round

Where this fits in the qualification

This page owns the scorecard — what goes on it and how it adds up. Choosing a container wax on several criteria together is the earlier capstone on the same idea; adhesion versus hot throw handles the commonest trade-off; the wick-retesting post prices a gate failure; and the series capstone places the scorecard in the full path to a bulk purchase.

Frequently asked questions