A tray of melts. How much wax, how much fragrance, how many trips to the pot?
Set your clamshell count, fill weight, and fragrance load, and get back wax in pounds, fragrance oil in ounces, and the cost of every melt in the batch. Everything stays in your browser.
The pour
What you are filling, and what your wax and fragrance have to be. Change any number and everything below follows it.
What one clamshell cost
Your shelf
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper the same numbers keep working after the pour — wax and fragrance come out of inventory by the ounces the make really used, clamshells leave stock at pack-out, and the cost per unit lands in your ledger to back the price you put on the market table. See for candle makers or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
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The arithmetic is short; the arguments are about the conventions underneath it. Here is how this calculator handles them, and where your own numbers take over.
How much wax and fragrance oil do I need for 50 clamshells?
Fifty clamshells at 2.5 oz each is 125 oz of finished fill (2.5 oz is just the default here — clamshells run different sizes by brand, so the fill weight is yours to set). Fill is wax plus fragrance, and load is figured on the wax, so at 8% you divide 125 by 1.08: roughly 115.7 oz of wax, which is 7.23 pounds, with the remaining 9.3 oz poured as fragrance oil. Change any input and the whole chain recalculates.
Why is fragrance load a setting here instead of a fixed number?
Because it is the most argued number in melt making. The range makers defend runs somewhere around 6 to 10%, and we start you at 8% as a reasonable middle, not a ruling. Your supplier's fragrance-load chart for the specific wax you pour is the authority, so when your wax says something different, set it once and the calculator follows you.
Is the load a percentage of the wax or of the whole melt?
Of the wax — that is the convention this calculator runs, and it is worth confirming how your own supplier's chart states it before you compare numbers. It matters more than it looks: 8% of a 125 oz fill would be an even 10 oz of fragrance, while 8% of wax weight means dividing the fill by 1.08 first, which lands at 9.3 oz. Small gap per clamshell, real gap across a market run, and the reason two makers quoting the same load can pour different melts.
What does each clamshell actually cost me?
Take the batch spend and divide it by the units you truly packed out. In the example above, 7.23 lb of wax at $3.20 a pound comes to $23.15, and 9.3 oz of fragrance at $1.50 an ounce is $13.94 — about 74 cents a melt before the clamshell itself, which goes in at whatever you pay per piece. And divide by the clamshells you actually filled; if the pot only stretched to 48, price the 48.