I have been asked a few times if my products are vegetarian or vegan-friendly. Vegetarian yes vegan no. This is mostly because I use beeswax in many of my products and that is considered non-vegan. The reason I do this as simple, it’s better for the people and the environment.
Most people do not understand or care to understand (it seems) how many of the vegan-friendly waxes are actually made. Things like Soy, Coconut, Palm, Carnauba, and others “waxes” are not found in nature!! None of these plants produce a “wax”, oils yes, but wax? NO!
The oils from these plants go through major processing most of the time using extremely high heat and chemicals that are not environmentally friendly. Also, many times the waxes used in vegan personal care products in the mass-market are 100% synthetics.
One report even showed that the soy wax used in 90% of product making actually gives off more carcinogenic chemicals then the wax is made from petroleum products, like paraffin and they’re made from GMO soy that is most commonly available and cheap. Vegan wax is solvent extracted from mostly GMO crops, is commercially farmed with pesticides and insecticides. The exact steps to produce vegan waxes are well protected, they are NOT required to disclose how or what is used to make them.
In general, after harvesting of the plant material, they are cleaned and ground into flakes or powder. The oil is solvent (hexane) extracted. The oil is then chilled and the wax settles out from the oil. Color is removed with chlorine bleaching. Deodorization is performed in the final stage of refining by vacuum distillation to remove free fatty acids, odor and color pigments to produce bland oil with a good shelf life. Next a chemical reaction – hydrogenation – converts some of the fatty acids in the oil from unsaturated to saturated. The main step in making vegan wax is hydrogenation. Hydrogenation is the process whereby the poly- and monounsaturated oils are solidified in order to increase the viscosity. This is done by the reaction of hydrogen with the oil at elevated temperature (140-225°C) in the presence of a nickel catalyst. This process dramatically alters the melting point of the oil, making it a solid at room temperature. The leftover plant material is then commonly used as animal feed. This is all far from a “natural” product!!!
Beeswax, on the other hand, is extremely environmentally friendly, and when harvested correctly is actually beneficial to the Bees and the hives long-term health. Unlike some of these synthetic waxes that are made from natural oils, beeswax can actually feed soil organisms and breaks down relatively easily with no environmental impact.
Because wax often has many natural components that actually help support human health, overall, and for the skin. With some of these other vegan waxes, they have very little to none after processing that’s good for the body and may actually still contain some of the chemicals used to make it.
Unlike “vegan” waxes. natural beeswax needs little done to it outside of being filtered. I do not use the “white” beeswax as it has been treated to remove scent and color, only the natural “raw” wax with all its color and scent. I also put in a lot of work to only get my wax from US suppliers that harvest ethically and support bee populations (as do most non-vegan makers of products).
So there you have the WHY of it. I could go into much greater detail into it but that would end up being a very long read.
aromatherapeutics 