Beeswax

Beeswax is rated Clear, and for once the comedogenic score attached to it was measured on a material called beeswax: Fulton's 1989 rabbit assay lists Beeswax at 0 to 2 on a 0 to 5 scale, with an asterisk for source variation. The worst end of that range is what Fulton himself called borderline, the best is nothing, and we identified no human comedogenicity study of beeswax as an isolated ingredient.

What it is

The wax honeybees secrete to build honeycomb, rendered and filtered for use. It is a mixture rather than a single compound — wax monoesters and more complex esters make up most of it, with straight-chain hydrocarbons, free fatty acids and smaller fractions of hydroxy esters and free fatty alcohols. Published compositional breakdowns differ between documents, so we give the shape rather than a composite percentage split we would have to stitch together from two sources. One feature of that mixture matters for what follows. Almost all of it is long-chain: the FAO's technical assessment puts the hydrocarbons predominantly at C27 to C33 and the free fatty acids mainly at C24 to C32, with the ester chains longer still. Beeswax therefore holds almost none of the shorter fatty acids that scored highest in Fulton's own fatty-acid table, where lauric acid at twelve carbons reads 3 in organic solvent and 4 in sunflower oil in his Table III, on his 0 to 5 scale, and the scores fall away on both sides of it — behenic acid, at twenty-two carbons, reads 1 in both columns. And its exact composition shifts with the bees, the season and the source, which is the practical meaning of the asterisk on its legacy number. Formulators use it to thicken and structure: to turn a liquid oil into a balm, hold a stick together, and give a product body, usually as one of the higher-melting components. On a label it is Beeswax or Cera Alba, and Cera Flava also appears. White and yellow beeswax are processing grades of the same natural material; the FAO assessment describes the white grade as bleached yellow wax. Synthetic Beeswax is a separate INCI material — a manufactured blend of esters, hydrocarbons, acids and alcohols meant to mimic it — and Fulton's table has no row for it.

Why we rate it Clear

We rate it Clear, at Low confidence. The evidence is a single legacy number, and being exact about what that number is and is not is the whole of the page. The number. Beeswax appears in James Fulton's 1989 rabbit-ear survey, the source of nearly every comedogenic score in circulation. His method: the ingredient diluted to about 10% in propylene glycol, 1 mL applied daily to the inner ear of New Zealand albino rabbits, five days a week for two weeks, three rabbits per assay, follicles then read for keratosis. Read the actual table and beeswax's entry is not a single figure. It is "0-2", carrying Fulton's asterisk, which his table defines as "results depend on source of raw material". So the flat 2 that some charts print, and the flat 0 that others do, are the two ends of a range Fulton reported as a range and tied to the source of the raw material. He did not say what varied — supplier, grade, batch or assay — only that the result did. The asterisk is beeswax's own, printed against the row; it is not inherited from a section heading, and beeswax is not among the rows in his oils section. What a 2 is worth. Fulton set out his own reading of his own scale in the methods: a grade of 0 to 1 "is not considered significant", 2 to 3 is "borderline", and only 4 to 5 is "uniformally reproduceable and considered positive". Beeswax's worst reading, 2, sits at the bottom edge of borderline; its best, 0, is nothing. Neither end is a positive comedogenic result, and neither is a clean guarantee. Clear on this site means no comedogenic concern on record, and here that is what it means and no more: one end of the only reading we hold sits inside the band Fulton called borderline, nothing in the record reaches his positive band, and there is no other evidence to weigh. It is a description of a thin record, not a clearance, and the Low confidence is doing as much work as the rating. Material identity, for once, is straightforward. Many of the notorious comedogenic numbers on this site turn out to belong to a material sitting next to the one on the label — a butter read as an oil, a derivative read as its parent, a glyceride read as the plain oil. Beeswax is not one of those cases. Fulton's row reads "Beeswax", and there is no synthetic, hydrogenated or PEG-modified beeswax row anywhere in the table for it to have been confused with. What the row does not say is which beeswax: Fulton named no supplier, no grade, no colour and no origin, so the range belongs to natural beeswax generically rather than to any particular white, yellow or bleached grade on a modern label. It is a rabbit-ear range from 1989, not a reading on human skin. The rest of the wax rows run the same way. In the same table candelilla wax reads 1, carnauba wax 1, ceresin wax 0, lanolin wax 1 and emulsifying wax NF 0, while sulfated jojoba oil — a wax that has been chemically modified — reads 3, against 0-2* for plain jojoba oil. Unmodified waxes clustered low in Fulton's hands and the one modified wax did not. That is a pattern in one laboratory's ingredient set, not a measurement of beeswax and not a mechanism we can demonstrate; beeswax's own entry still reached 2 at the top of its range. It runs the same direction as the number, which is as much as can be said for it.

What the evidence doesn’t tell you

We identified no human comedogenicity study of beeswax as an isolated ingredient. The model exists — Mills and Kligman's 1982 paper in Archives of Dermatology, 118:903–905, applied materials to the human back and read the result by cyanoacrylate follicular biopsy — and we identified no run of it on beeswax on its own. The human work in this area that we hold, including Draelos and DiNardo's 2006 re-evaluation, tested finished products rather than single ingredients, and a finished-product result cannot isolate what any one component of the formula contributed. Morris and Kwan's 1983 rabbit study, a contemporary assay that openly contradicts Fulton on several materials, prints 32 rows — seven lanolins, nine vegetable oils, eleven esters and five surfactants — and beeswax is not among them, so we have no second numeric reading of beeswax to check Fulton against. The 0 to 2 is one laboratory, one method, one decade, and one animal model that is not human. The asterisk is not boilerplate. Beeswax is a natural product whose composition shifts with its source, and official specifications for it carry tests for several potential adulterants, so source and purity are live questions rather than theoretical ones. "Results depend on source of raw material" has unusually literal force here: the beeswax in one product is not necessarily chemically identical to the beeswax in another, and we cannot tell which sort produced Fulton's 0 and which produced his 2. The composition point cuts one way only. Beeswax's fatty acids are long-chain and it holds almost none of the shorter acids that scored highest in Fulton's fatty-acid table; that is a fact about the molecule, and it is consistent with a low reading, but it is not itself a measurement of whether beeswax plugs a pore, and we are not going to present it as one. A structural argument is a reason to expect a result, not the result. Derivatives and the synthetic version are separate materials. Synthetic Beeswax, Hydrogenated Beeswax, PEG-modified beeswaxes and beeswax-derived acids and alcohols appear on labels and were not what Fulton tested; where a wax has been chemically modified — as with sulfated jojoba — the result has sometimes changed. And the field-wide caveat applies in both directions. Draelos and DiNardo argued in a 2006 re-evaluation in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology that rabbit-ear results do not reliably transfer to human skin, and a 2025 review in JAAD Reviews found that no standardised comedogenicity test exists and that "non-comedogenic" is an unregulated label. That is why we hold the number loosely — and it is also why a low rabbit score, on its own, is not proof that beeswax is safe for a given face at a given concentration.

Where you’ll see it

Beeswax is a structuring wax, and the categories below are illustrative rather than the result of a market survey we have run. It tends to appear at its highest concentrations in balms, salves, lip balms and lipsticks, ointments and mascaras, where it can be a major part of the formula rather than a trace ingredient; it also turns up in thick creams, stick products and some hair pomades. On a label look for Beeswax, Cera Alba or Cera Flava. Two neighbours are not the same material and are rated separately where we rate them at all: Synthetic Beeswax, a manufactured mimic, and the various beeswax derivatives.

Sources

Each source says what it actually is. Several widely-cited “sources” for comedogenic ratings are republishing the same 1989 assay, and counting them as independent agreement is how a thin evidence base gets made to look thick.

1. Fulton JE. "Comedogenicity and irritancy of commonly used ingredients in skin care products." J Soc Cosmet Chem 40:321–333 (1989) The primary source of nearly every comedogenic score online, and the only numeric assay of beeswax we hold. Read off a render of the journal scan rather than from a list quoting it. Method: ingredient at roughly 10% in propylene glycol, applied daily to the inner ear of New Zealand albino rabbits for two weeks, three rabbits per assay, follicles scored for keratosis. A survey Fulton himself called "not at all definitive but simply designed to stimulate research". Two things about the beeswax entry are almost never reported and are the point of this page: its entry is "0-2" with the asterisk for "results depend on source of raw material", not the flat 0 or flat 2 that circulate; and Fulton's own methods define 0–1 as "not considered significant" and 2–3 as "borderline". It identifies no grade, supplier or origin for the beeswax tested.
2. Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA). "Beeswax — Chemical and Technical Assessment," prepared for the 65th JECFA meeting (2005) A technical composition and identity document, not a comedogenicity study and nothing to do with pores. Cited only for what beeswax is made of: the classes of compound present, the chain-length ranges used on this page (hydrocarbons about C27–C33, free fatty acids about C24–C32), the relationship between the yellow and white grades, and the fact that its specifications include tests for potential adulterants. It says nothing about acne, follicles or skin, and its percentage figures do not agree in every detail with those in the CIR wax report, which is why this page does not print a composite breakdown.
3. Elder RL (ed.). "Final Report on the Safety Assessment of Candelilla Wax, Carnauba Wax, Japan Wax, and Beeswax." J Am Coll Toxicol 3(3):1–41 (1984) An expert-panel safety assessment — a final report, not an interim or tentative one — that concludes these waxes are safe as used in cosmetics. It assesses SAFETY, not comedogenicity, and does not measure pore-clogging; cited for confirming that beeswax is in widespread cosmetic use and for its own compositional account, which differs in places from JECFA's. A safety conclusion is not evidence of non-comedogenicity, and we do not use it as one.
4. Draelos ZD, DiNardo JC. "A re-evaluation of the comedogenicity concept." J Am Acad Dermatol 54:507–512 (2006) A Current Issues and Opinion piece in JAAD that tested finished products on human upper backs in small panels and found products testing non-comedogenic despite containing ingredients the rabbit assay had scored comedogenic. Cited in both directions: it is why we hold a legacy rabbit score loosely, and it is also why a near-zero rabbit score is not by itself proof that beeswax is safe. It is a product-level study, so it cannot attribute a result to any single ingredient, and it is not a same-substance validation of the rabbit model against human skin.
5. "Comedogenicity in cosmeceuticals — a review of clinical relevance, regulatory gaps, and future directions." JAAD Reviews (2025) A recent peer-reviewed review of the whole field, covering literature from 1972 to 2025. Finds that no standardised comedogenicity test exists and that "non-comedogenic" is an unregulated label. It is a synthesis of the legacy literature, not a new measurement, and independent of Fulton only in authorship, since the corpus it surveys includes his. Cited for the field-wide caveat, not for anything specific to beeswax.
6. acne.org comedogenic ingredient list A consumer list, not a measurement. It is one of the places a reader will have met a comedogenic number for beeswax, alongside CosDNA, Face Reality and the many "is beeswax comedogenic" pages published by companies that sell beeswax balms and lip products. Listed for disclosure, not corroboration. Acne.org now describes its ratings as drawn from several studies under its own rule rather than from a single table, so we do not describe it as a straight republisher of Fulton; we have not traced which list copied which, and we do not assert a chain we did not follow.

Others in the same family

Waxes behave similarly enough that the evidence for one is often wrongly read across to the others. These are its structural relatives, not a guess.

• Candelilla Wax Clear Low
• Carnauba Wax Clear Low

Last reviewed 2026-08-20 · How we decide

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