Fragrance Load Percentage: The Spec Most Brands Hide

4–6% load: subtle. Effective in small spaces under 150 sq ft. Common in mass-market candles where wax cost is the primary constraint.
6–8% load: standard premium. Effective in 150–350 sq ft rooms. Most well-formulated premium candles operate here.
8–10% load: high. Effective in 300–500 sq ft. Coconut wax can hold this concentration without smothering the wick. Soy wax often cannot.
Above 10%: technically possible, practically problematic. Wick smothering, incomplete combustion, soot, reduced burn time, and sometimes wax pool flooding.

The relationship between load and throw isn't strictly linear. Doubling the load doesn't double the throw — there are diminishing returns past about 9% in coconut wax and past about 7% in soy. Once you exceed the wax's fragrance-holding capacity, additional oil just sits on the surface or interferes with combustion.

Three reasons, in roughly descending order:

1. It exposes formulation choices that don't match the price.

A brand selling a $50 candle at 6% fragrance load is exposed to the criticism that the load doesn't justify the price. The premium positioning implies high fragrance content; the actual formulation may not deliver it. Publishing the load makes the discrepancy visible.

2. It's hard to verify externally.

Unlike wax type (visible on the label) or burn time (measurable by the buyer), fragrance load requires gas chromatography or weighing the wax and the cured candle separately. Brands that don't publish the load can't easily be challenged on it. The information is genuinely difficult for the buyer to extract independently.

3. It interacts with marketing claims.

A candle marketed for "strong scent throw" at 5% load is making a claim the formulation doesn't support. Publishing the load reveals when the marketing and the formulation are misaligned. The conservative move is to not publish.

Wendigo candles run 8% load across the line. This sits at the upper end of standard premium and the lower end of high. The choice wasn't arbitrary:

Below 7% in coconut wax, throw is insufficient for typical living-room volumes. We tested 6% and 7% formulations during development; neither produced the throw we wanted in 300+ sq ft rooms.
Above 9% with our wick-wax system, burn quality degrades. We tested 9% and 10% formulations; 9% was marginally acceptable, 10% produced visible soot, reduced burn time, and occasional flame instability.
8% is the formulation sweet spot. Strong throw, clean burn, consistent across our six scents. It's not the highest possible load — it's the highest load that maintains the burn quality we tested for.

The percentage is necessary but not sufficient. Two candles at 8% load can perform very differently depending on:

Quality of the fragrance oil. Premium custom compositions perform differently than mass-market stock fragrance oils at the same load. The composition matters as much as the percentage.
Composition structure. A heavy-base composition at 8% throws differently than a heavy-top composition at 8%. Base notes carry farther; top notes flash off faster.
Wax type. Coconut wax holds and releases fragrance more efficiently than soy. Same load, different throw.
Wick size and material. Mismatched wicks can choke or over-volatilize the same fragrance.
Vessel geometry. A wider vessel produces a larger melt pool, which exposes more fragrance to heat per unit time.

A spec sheet that includes load alongside these other variables is informative. Load alone is a partial picture.

A direct question works: "What is the fragrance load percentage of your candles?"

Most brands will answer. Some will answer with a range ("6–10% depending on the scent"), which is partially useful — at minimum you get upper and lower bounds. Some will answer with a number but no methodology, which means they probably know but haven't documented. A few will decline.

The decline is itself information. A brand that has the number and won't share it has decided that the information would be more damaging than helpful.

Most premium candle brands operate in the 6–9% range. Brands operating above 9% will usually advertise it. Brands operating below 6% will usually not advertise it. The absence of a published number is a soft indicator that the load is on the lower end of the brand's price tier.

This isn't a rule, just a pattern. There are well-formulated 6% candles at premium prices where the load is genuinely calibrated for the wax-wick system. There are also 6% candles at premium prices where the brand is capturing margin on undisclosed formulation choices.

The way to tell them apart is to ask, and to evaluate the rest of the spec sheet. A brand that publishes wax ratio, wick certification, fragrance compliance, burn time with protocol, and throw with conditions — but not load — has probably made an intentional choice about that one omission. A brand that publishes none of the above is operating at a different disclosure baseline entirely.

All six scents in the current line run at 8% by weight in the candle. The load is identical across scents because the wick-wax system is identical; the variability between scents is in the composition, not the concentration.

Hollow: 8%
Embers: 8%
Frozen Earth: 8%
Black Pine: 8%
Birch & Bone: 8%
Cabin: 8%

The room spray also runs at 8% load (different carrier dynamics). The body oil runs at 4%. The lotion runs at 1.5%. Each format's load is set by what the carrier can hold and what skin or air can tolerate, not by what would maximize fragrance intensity.

Fragrance load is a number. The number is either disclosed or it isn't. The brands that disclose it have decided the buyer should be able to evaluate the formulation directly. The brands that don't have decided the opposite. Both are legitimate business choices. Knowing which choice a brand has made is the useful information.