How much fragrance to add to scented candles
You’ve prepared everything to make your candles, chosen your wax and which wick to use, but now you need to add fragrance to your candle—how much do you actually need?
Knowing how to properly scent a candle is essential to ensure your candle has the right aroma without compromising the stability of the candle itself (such as sweating or curdling). Below is a guide on how to correctly fragrance your candles to achieve the best possible scent throw.
The ratio between fragrance oil and wax
The amount of fragrance oil you should add to a candle depends on 3 factors:
- The type of wax you’re using
- The flash point of the fragrance oil
- The strength of the fragrance
Understanding the flash point of fragrance oils
Many liquids release vapors, including fragrance oils—this is the point at which the liquid begins to turn into gas.
In general, the warmer a liquid is, the more it wants to “release” vapors into the air, while cooler liquids hold onto their vapors much better.
The flash point is the temperature at which a liquid (any liquid) emits enough vapor that an open flame can ignite it. This doesn’t mean it will sustain a continuous flame, but even a small spark can set it off—hence the name flash point.
The only thing that can ignite the vapors is an actual ignition source, not just heat.
For example, immersing a fluid that has reached its flash point into very hot wax (as when adding fragrance oil to wax) will not ignite the oil. However, a match (an open flame) will.
The flash point you find on your fragrance’s SDS sheet is simply an indication of the temperature at which your fragrance can ignite if exposed to an open flame. It is not something to be overly concerned with when mixing fragrance into wax.
Calculating the percentage of fragrance to use
Before calculating how much fragrance oil to add to your wax, you need to decide how strong you want your scent to be (while keeping in mind the natural strength of the fragrance you’ve chosen). Most waxes will not hold more than 12% fragrance oil, but to ensure the stability of the candle is not compromised, we recommend using up to 10% fragrance oil for optimal scent throw.
This means that if your finished candle weighs 100 g, then 90 g should be wax and 10 g fragrance oil.
If you only want a subtle scent, we recommend using 6%+ fragrance oil.
Example calculation:
Final candle weight = 200 g
Desired fragrance load = 8%
200 g × 8% = 16 g fragrance oil
So, for a 200 g candle, you would mix 184 g wax + 16 g fragrance oil.
Measuring fragrance oil
You may be wondering why we measure fragrance oil in grams when it is a liquid. There’s a good reason for this: many fragrance oils have different densities (some are thicker, some are thinner), which can throw off measurements if done by volume (ml).
Measuring fragrance oil by weight (grams) rather than volume (ml) ensures a much more accurate ratio of wax to fragrance oil.
