You’re all ready to go, keen to make a new batch of candles. You’ve worked out you need 300g of candle wax to fill your base and you know your wax can take a scent load of 10%. So you take 10% from 300g which is 30g, therefore you need 30g of fragrance oil and 270g of wax. Easy peasy…

Hold up! Before we go any further, let’s talk about what you’ve done so far and what issues you may run into. Tunnelling, poor scent throw, and wicks not staying lit could be a real issue here because the calculation you just used isn’t quite right.

What exactly is scent load?

Let’s take a step back. There is some confusion in the industry about what exactly scent load is. We simply explain it as the ratio of fragrance oil to the weight of your wax. Yes, 30g is 10% of 300g, but it’s not 10% of the wax weight, which is what you need. A 10% scent load of 300g would actually be 30g of fragrance oil added to 300g of wax, making your finish product weight 330g. Adding 30g of oil to 270g of wax works out at approximately 11.11% fragrance oil - way more than the 10% scent load your wax can take! If you keep working it out this way, you’ll always overload your wax with fragrance oil.

It’s good to note what happens if your wax does become overloaded with fragrance oil. You could be experiencing other common issues without knowing it’s your oil to wax ratio causing the issue. Here’s what you should look out for:

The wick tends to struggle and will only achieve a small flame, or sometimes the flame will die completely.
A struggling wick could result in candle tunnelling or not achieve a full melt pool.
The candle can also have poor hot throw as there’s not enough heat being generated to allow the fragrance to release from the wax.

If you experience any of these common issues, why not try lowering your fragrance oil percentage and see if this resolves them. We recommend that candle makers use 8% fragrance oil for their candles unless it’s a really light oil. This will help keep the wick from clogging and avoid poor performance problems, like those listed above.

Calculating The Right Weights

So how do you calculate the right scent load for your candle wax?

To keep things simple and give a helping hand, we’ve created a calculator that’ll do the maths for you. All you have to do is enter the amounts you already know: your desired candle weight and the percentage of fragrance oil you want.

Desired weight (grams)

Ratio (%)

Total № of candles

Wax needed

Oil needed

Let’s try the calculator with our example from earlier. We had a desired candle weight of 300g and we want 10% fragrance oil.

You should see that you actually only need 272.7g of wax and 27.2g of fragrance oil. That’s over 2g less than before and could make all the difference in your candles.

It’s super simple to use and that’s exactly why we made it for you. Don’t forget: If you need to know how much wax weight and fragrance weight is needed for a batch of candles, you can also add you candle quantity to the calculator!

Explore Our Unique Fragrance Oil Offerings

Save While Sampling Our Range

At NI Candle Supplies, we understand that choosing the perfect fragrance oils can sometimes feel overwhelming. To make your selection easier and more enjoyable, we're excited to offer a fantastic promotion across our entire scent range.

Simply add any 10 x 10ml bottles of fragrance oil to your cart and 5 of them will automatically be FREE!*