Comparison of the mass-loss rates for carbon stars between the present work and G09. The current work uses optical constants for amorphous carbon from Zubko et al. (1996), while G09 used constants from Rouleau & Martin (1991). Top: a direct comparison for the common sources shows that the new models have much lower MLRs. Bottom: ratios of the MLRs tend to be approximately nine, although the difference between the models drops for the highest MLRs. The gold data points in the bottom panel are the median values for the log of the MLR ratio in each 0.5 dex bin, plotted against the mean log MLR; the error bars are the formal standard deviations.