The master load table

Almost every Indian candle maker runs the whole range at 8%, or at 10%, because that is the number they were given when they started. It is a reasonable place to begin and a poor place to stay. A fragrance oil is not one substance; it is a blend of molecules with wildly different weights, volatilities and detection thresholds. Vanillin, oud resinoids and amber musks are heavy, tenacious and low-threshold: a little goes a long way and stays a long time. Limonene, linalool and the light green and aquatic materials are the opposite — they evaporate readily, they are the first thing lost in a hot pour, and by the time the candle has cured for two weeks a meaningful proportion of what you dosed has already gone.

Run both at the same percentage and you get exactly what you would expect. The vanilla is dense, sweet and slightly heavy in the room, and at the top of the range it may bead oil on the surface within a fortnight. The citrus, poured on the same day at the same number, reads polite at best. The customer who buys both does not think "these are compositionally different scent families with different volatility profiles". They think one candle is good and the other is a dud, and they conclude the brand is inconsistent. That judgement is much harder to recover from than a single weak scent, because it attaches to everything you sell.

The fix is to stop treating load as a brand-wide constant and start treating it as a per-family variable that you set once, test, and then never improvise again. Below is the working table. Every figure is a starting point to be confirmed by your own testing in your own wax, jar and room — not a fixed rule. Oil cost per candle is calculated at CSI 1kg pricing, which is the honest basis for anyone running production volumes; at 100g pricing the same candles cost slightly more.

Family by family, and why the number is what it is

Calibrating a whole range so every candle reads the same strength

A family starting point gets you close. Calibration is what makes a range feel deliberate. The method is deliberately narrow: test at the family starting point, adjust the outliers by ±2% only, then lock the number and stop touching it. Two percent is roughly 4g on a 200g candle, which is about the smallest change most people can reliably smell across a cured candle — anything finer is noise, and anything coarser overshoots.

Changing the load changes the fuel. A candle carrying 20g of oil burns differently from the same candle carrying 12g — more oil means a slightly softer, more combustible melt pool, and heavily loaded candles can drown or clog a wick that was correctly sized at a lower load. This is why the two must be tuned together, in that order: set the load first, then confirm the wick against the final load, never the reverse.

The test is simple. At the locked load, in your production jar, the melt pool should reach the jar wall within about two hours of the first burn without the flame guttering, mushrooming heavily or throwing soot. If the pool tunnels, go up one wick size. If the flame is tall, restless and sooty, go down one. Eco Candle Wicks come in Thin (C1) and Thick (C2), which is usually enough spread for a 200g container; the full wick range covers larger diameters and wooden options. Bear in mind that a fresh, high-load candle almost always needs the larger of two candidate wicks, because a light note only reaches the room once the pool is wide.

The 500-candle cost case for family-specific loads

Family loads are usually argued on quality. The money argument is just as strong, and it is easiest to see across a festive run. Take a 500-candle Diwali production run — 100 candles each of five 200g scents, one per family — and price it two ways at CSI 1kg fragrance pricing.

The honest version of that number subtracts the wax that replaces the oil. Family loads use 1.8kg less fragrance and therefore 1.8kg more wax — 91.8kg instead of 90kg — which at roughly ₹0.60 per gram for Luxury Soy Wax Chunks adds about ₹1,080. Net saving on the run: ₹9,800, or ₹19.60 per candle, on candles that also read more consistently than the flat-10% version. That is close to the cost of 200 jars, or the entire wick budget for the run twice over.

Treat the materials figure as roughly 30–35% of a sensible retail price. On the ₹243.73 sandalwood that suggests ₹699 to ₹799, and on the ₹217.74 citrus it suggests ₹649 to ₹729 — which is a useful reminder that family loads let you price a fresh candle slightly lower without eroding margin, because the cheap oils are exactly the ones that need the most of it.

Wax ceilings, order sizes and yield per bottle

Every number in this guide is bounded by the wax. A fragrance load ceiling is not a suggestion — it is the maximum the wax can hold in solution, and exceeding it produces sweating, poor adhesion, unpredictable burning and, counter-intuitively, a candle that often smells weaker than the same oil dosed correctly. Too much fragrance oil genuinely can make a candle smell weaker, and the load table above is designed so that you never find out the hard way.

The practical consequence is that your wax choice decides which families you can push. If most of your range is fresh, citrus and green, Luxury Soy Chunks gives you room to go to 12% on a stubborn scent; CSI 464 does not. If most of your range is gourmand and oriental, the 10% ceiling on CSI 464 is irrelevant, because you will never approach it. Choose the wax for the catalogue you actually sell, then set loads inside it.

Because the grams per candle differ by family, so does what a bottle buys you. This is the table to consult before placing a festive order, and it is the reason a flat "100g makes six candles" rule quietly misleads people running mixed ranges.

Read down the right-hand column and the ordering logic writes itself: a kilogram of a gourmand oil covers two-thirds more candles than a kilogram of a citrus oil. If you are planning a 500-candle festive run split across families, size each bottle against its own load rather than buying the same quantity of everything. For Diwali on 8 November 2026, with fragrance ordering, a 14 to 21 day cure, the production run itself, a second cure and packing all ahead of dispatch, oils need to be decided and ordered by late August or early September — which makes this the right moment to run a calibration round rather than the middle of October.

One last note on interpretation. If a scent still reads weak at the top of its family range after a full cure and a correctly sized wick, the load is no longer the variable — the oil itself may simply be a low-impact formulation. Some oils deliver more throw per gram than others, which is a purchasing decision rather than a process one; we have compared them in which fragrance oils produce strong throw at a lower load and in the strongest hot throw oils in soy wax. Change the oil before you change the ceiling.

Frequently asked questions