Candelilla Wax

Candelilla wax is the bloom on the stems of a leafless shrub of the Chihuahuan Desert, in northern Mexico and the Trans-Pecos of Texas. The plant coats itself to slow water loss. Harvesters lift whole plants and boil them in acidified water; the wax rises and is skimmed off.

In a formulation it does much the same work as beeswax, and it is the substitute normally reached for when a product must contain nothing of animal origin.^[1]

Candelilla is chemically unlike the ester-dominated plant waxes. Roughly half of it is straight-chain hydrocarbons, clustered around thirty-one carbons, with esters, free acids and sterols making up the rest. It is hard and brittle, but it melts lower than carnauba, which makes it easier to work into a blend.

Its naming is inconsistent. The plant is Euphorbia antisyphilitica, while the cosmetic ingredient is commonly listed as Euphorbia cerifera wax or simply as candelilla cera.^[2] All three refer to the same shrub.

The species was described botanically in 1829 by the German botanist Joseph Gerhard Zuccarini. The epithet antisyphilitica preserves a folk use of the plant against syphilis; it is a record of what was believed, not of what was shown.^[3]

Commercial extraction of the wax is a twentieth-century development. Collection built up from about 1900 for sealing wax, phonograph records, polishes and insulation, and demand rose sharply during both world wars. The industry contracted after 1945, as cheaper petroleum waxes took its markets and harvested stands thinned; what revived it was demand from food and cosmetics rather than from industry.^[3]

Candelilla gives a moulded stick hardness, rigidity and gloss, and it binds oil well enough to reduce the tendency of a lipstick to weep its liquid phase on standing.^[4] In balms and mascaras it is used as a structurant and film former on the same reasoning.

It is not a like-for-like replacement for beeswax. Candelilla is harder and less plastic, so a formula converted from one to the other generally has to be rebalanced rather than simply swapped.

The Cosmetic Ingredient Review panel covered candelilla in its 1984 assessment of plant waxes and left that conclusion in place on re-review.^[5] As a food additive it is E 902 under Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 of 16 December 2008.^[6]

The constraint that distinguishes candelilla is conservational rather than toxicological. Euphorbia antisyphilitica falls under Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, as part of a genus-wide listing in force since the convention took effect in 1975, so raw wax crossing a border requires a CITES permit issued by the Mexican management authority. Since 2010 an annotation has exempted finished products packaged and ready for retail sale, which is why a lipstick travels freely and a drum of wax does not.^[7]