How Much Fragrance To Add To Candles (2024)

So, you’ve prepped everything ready to make your candles, chosen your wax and which wick to use, but now you need to add a fragrance to your candle, how much do you need?

Knowing how to properly fragrance a candle is vital to ensuring your candle has the correct scent throw which won’t compromise the stability of the candle itself. (Sweating and curdling of the candle). Below is a guide on how to correctly fragrance your candles to achieve optimal scent throw.

The amount of fragrance oil you should add to your candle depends on 3 factors:

- The type of wax you use
- The flashpoint of the fragrance oil
- The strength of the scent

Many fluids give off vapors, including fragrance oils, which is the point in time when the liquid starts turning into a gas.

Generally speaking, the warmer a fluid is the more it wants to “release” vapors to the atmosphere, but cooler liquids hold their vapors much better.

The flash point is the temperature where a fluid (any fluid) gives off enough vapor that an open flame could ignite it. This doesn’t have to be a continuous more ‘flammable fire’ but a brief flash of light, hence the name flash point.

The only thing that can ignite the vapor is a true ignition source, not just heat.

For example, submerging a fluid that is heated to its flash point temperature in super hot wax (as is the case with adding fragrance oil to wax), it won’t ignite the oil, but lighting a match (an open flame) over it will.

The Flash Point that you will find on your fragrances SDS sheet is an indication of the temperature at which you fragrance will ignite to an open flame and is therefore not something that needs to be overly considered when mixing with wax.

Read more about Flashpoints and what they mean in our bloghere.

Before you start calculating how much fragrance oil to add to your wax you need to decide how strong you want your scent throw (Keeping in mind how strong your chosen fragrance is). Most waxes will hold no more than 12% of fragrance oil however to assure the candle stability is not compromised we advise using 10% fragrance oil for optimal scent throw. This means if your candle is 100g in total- 90g should be wax and 10g would be your fragrance oil.

If you only want a subtle scent throw, we recommend using 6%+ of fragrance oil.

You may be wondering why we measure our fragrance oil in grams, after all, it is a liquid. There is a valid reason for this. Many fragrances have different densities (some are thicker than others), this can cause miscalculations and you may end up adding too much of one fragrance if it is a thicker liquid and vice versa.

Measuring your fragrance oil in weight (grams) rather than volume (ml) will result in a more accurate wax to fragrance oil ratio.

And there you have it!

Please note this is a basic guide and many different things can affect the final outcome of your candle.