Wonderful Waxes

We all know what a wax feels like from experiences of warming Babybel rinds in our hands to model them it into tiny red sculptures, using Vaseline or beeswax to protect our chapped lips or hair wax to style our ‘do, or watching water bead on the waxed surface of an apple or surfboard. But what does this motley crew of substances have in common?

At the Materials Library we have a particular soft spot (pun intended) for waxes, partly because this weird grouping of sticky, slippery and unctuous materials are actually quite different in terms of their chemistry and their origins in nature. Waxes can be animal-, vegetable -and mineral-derived, made by everything from otters and kale to beetles and bacteria, but they are held together by their shared behaviour and the history of how they’ve been used.

Dig into each of our waxy substances below, and for a longer read about the weird and wonderful properties of waxes as a family, check out our waxy blog post.