Palm free balm: the ingredients that are palm and never say so on the label

A palm free balm at 9 percent wax with a derivative audit covering stearic acid, cetyl alcohol and tocopherol carriers, a 60 ml jar and a 66 to 72 C pour.

A palm free balm is easy to design and hard to prove. Nothing on an ingredient list has to say palm, several of the most useful hardening materials are made from it, and the word appears nowhere on the drum. This page audits the derivatives, sets out exactly what to ask a supplier for, and gives a formula that replaces the hardness palm normally supplies without using a single derivative.

• Palm free, not vegan
• No stearic acid
• Melt 75-80 C, pour 66-72 C
• 60 ml jar, 55 g fill
• Claim needs supplier declarations

What a palm free claim actually commits you to

Reformulating is the small half of the job. INCI names describe chemistry, not botany, so a material made from palm and the identical material made from rapeseed carry the same name on the label and often the same specification sheet. That is not a loophole anyone is exploiting; it is what the naming system is for, and the consequences are explained in INCI names explained.

Two things follow. First, you cannot audit your own product by reading its ingredient list, and neither can a customer read yours. Second, a palm free claim is a supply chain claim rather than a formulation claim, so its substantiation is a stack of paper from your suppliers, not the recipe. If you sell, that paper is what a market surveillance authority would ask to see, and if you cannot produce it the claim is unsubstantiated whether or not it happens to be true.

The good news for anhydrous makers is that the exposure is narrow. A balm has no emulsifier, no surfactant and usually no glycerin, which removes most of the derivative list at a stroke. What is left is a short, checkable set.

The derivative audit

Two rows deserve expanding. Stearic acid is the cheapest firmness on a balm bench and is overwhelmingly made from palm stearin, so it is the single most likely reason an otherwise plant simple formula is not palm free. The fatty alcohols are the second, because reducing a palm fatty acid to cetyl or stearyl alcohol is the standard industrial route and nothing on the label records it; the material itself is covered in fatty alcohols.

The other trap is anything sold as a base or a blend. A "shea blend", a "faux butter" or a ready made balm base is a formula, not an ingredient, and its hard fraction is very often palm or fully hydrogenated palm kernel. The category and how to read it is set out in blended and faux butters.

Getting it in writing

Ask for a botanical origin statement, by material, on supplier letterhead or supplier email, naming the plant species or stating that the material is not derived from Elaeis guineensis or Elaeis oleifera at any stage. Four specific things make a declaration usable:

• It names the source, not the absence. "Not palm" is weaker than "derived from sunflower". A supplier who can name the crop has actually asked their own supplier.
• It covers carriers, diluents and processing aids, not just the headline material. This is what catches tocopherol carriers and the fatty acid half of an ester.
• It is dated and tied to a grade or article number. Suppliers reformulate and change source. A declaration from three years ago against a product code that no longer exists proves nothing.
• It comes from the manufacturer or is passed through with attribution. A reseller ticking a box on their own website is not a declaration, and it will not survive a question from an auditor.

File each one against the material, and link your batch records to the specific lots the declarations cover, so any finished batch can be traced back to the paper that supports its claim. The mechanics are in batch records, and the wider question of what to ask a supplier for at the point of purchase is in sourcing ingredients. Re-request declarations annually and on every supplier change.

The hardness problem

Take stearic acid out of a formula and something has to do its work. Commercial stearic acid is a stearic and palmitic mixture whose grade sets its melt: a 50 percent grade solidifies near 54 to 56 C and a 95 percent grade near 67 to 70 C. At 1 to 3 percent it firms and opacifies a balm for almost no money and almost no change in feel. Nothing else on a palm free bench does exactly that.

The nearest substitutes work by different mechanisms, so the swap is not one for one.

The comparison that matters is kokum against palm stearin, and it is set out with the fatty acid numbers in butters compared and kokum and mango butter. Kokum's triglycerides are roughly 70 to 80 percent a single species, stearic on both outer positions with oleic in the middle, which is why it sets crisply and rarely grains. Expect the hard fat line of a palm free reformulation to cost somewhere between twenty and eighty percent more, and price the swap properly with the cost calculator before committing to a range.

The formula

Weight percent of the total batch, adding to exactly 100. No stearic acid, no fatty alcohols, no esters, no blended butters. A 60 ml jar takes about 55 g of set balm at a working density of 0.92 g per millilitre, so 500 g fills eight jars after a 10 percent allowance for losses.

Why each number is what it is

9 percent beeswax is deliberately at the low end for a jar balm. The hardness in this formula is meant to come from the butters, because wax hardness and butter hardness feel different: wax adds drag and a matte, slightly waxy film, butter adds body that melts on contact. Pushing beeswax to 12 percent would hit the same penetrometer reading and feel noticeably worse.

15 percent kokum is the load bearing decision. It replaces both the palm stearin a commercial balm would use and the 2 to 3 percent of stearic acid a craft recipe would reach for, and it does it with a butter that has more stearic acid in it than shea does. Below about 10 percent the balm sets softer than most people expect from a jar product; above 20 percent it turns chalky and can crack when dug into.

18 percent refined shea supplies the cushion kokum cannot. Refined rather than unrefined is a texture decision as much as a smell one: the unsaponifiable fraction that gives unrefined shea its character also contributes to its graining behaviour. The 33 percent total butter load is high enough to carry the formula without any stearic acid at all, which is the point of the exercise.

57.9 percent liquid oils split three ways. High-oleic sunflower at 34.9 percent is the bulk phase, neutral and stable for one to two years. Jojoba at 15 percent is a liquid wax ester rather than a triglyceride and buys shelf life. Castor at 8 percent gives the film enough cling to survive a handwash, which is what separates a hand balm from a body balm; it is well under the tack ceiling that starts to bite above about 25 percent. 0.1 percent mixed tocopherols sits at the measured optimum for alpha-tocopherol in oil of around 100 parts per million, above which it can act as a pro-oxidant.

Method, pour temperature and cure

1. Weigh phase A into one jug, taring between each addition. Weigh the tocopherol separately into a small dish.
2. Melt at 75 to 80 C. Stand the jug in simmering water and hold until the liquid is completely clear. Kokum melts low but shea does not fully dissolve its high-melting fraction until the top of that band, and an incomplete melt is the direct cause of grain.
3. Cool below 60 C and add phase B. Stir in the tocopherol once the reading drops under 60 C.
4. Pour at 66 to 72 C into warm, dry jars, in one continuous movement, filling to about 3 mm below the rim.
5. Cool fast. Twenty to thirty minutes in a fridge once a surface skin has formed. Slow cooling in a warm room is how a shea containing balm grains.
6. Cure 24 to 48 hours at room temperature before capping, labelling or judging hardness. A jar assessed at two hours reads softer than the same jar at 48.

If you add rice bran or sunflower wax as a hardener, the melt hold rises to 85 to 90 C for those materials to go fully into solution, and the pour window rises with it to 72 to 78 C. That is a different process, not a small adjustment, and the reasoning behind every window is in pour temperatures.

Adjusting hardness without palm

• Firmer: kokum from 15 to 18 percent, taken from the sunflower oil. This is the first lever and usually the only one needed.
• Firmer still, for a hot climate: add 2 percent rice bran wax from the sunflower oil and raise the melt hold to 85 to 90 C. Expect a slightly drier, shorter feel.
• Softer: kokum to 12 percent and beeswax to 8, both points into the sunflower oil. Do not go below 7 percent beeswax in a jar of this size or it will slump in a warm room.
• Less greasy: replace 8 points of sunflower with squalane, which is olive or sugarcane derived and absorbs fast. Check the origin declaration for this one too.
• Lower cost: kokum to 10 percent and shea to 23 percent, accepting a softer set and a higher grain risk.

Failure modes

Palm free or certified sustainable palm

The honest position is that these are two defensible choices and only one of them is usually argued honestly.

The case for certified palm is agronomic. Oil palm yields around 3 to 4 tonnes of oil per hectare per year, against roughly 0.7 for rapeseed and sunflower and 0.4 for soy. It supplies about a third of the world's vegetable oil from under a tenth of its oil crop land, so replacing it with a lower yielding crop moves land use rather than reducing it. If you buy palm, the certification model matters more than the certificate: segregated and identity preserved material is physically certified, whereas mass balance mixes certified and conventional oil and tracks only the volumes, so a mass balance drum may contain no certified oil at all. The models and the claims each one permits are set out in palm oil and palm stearin.

The case for palm free is not primarily environmental. It is that a small maker cannot realistically buy segregated certified palm derivatives in hobby or small commercial quantities, cannot audit a derivative supply chain, and sells to customers who have decided to avoid palm for their own reasons. Going palm free is a supply chain and consumer preference decision that you can actually verify, which is worth something that a certificate you cannot check is not. What it is not is a demonstrated environmental improvement, and claiming otherwise is the sort of unsupported eco framing discussed in chemical free and clean beauty claims.

Label wording, records, and where the decision sits

In the EU and UK, cosmetic claims are governed by common criteria requiring legal compliance, truthfulness, evidential support, honesty, fairness and informed decision making, and the Commission's technical document adds specific guidance on "free from" claims. Two rules bite here. A free from claim must not denigrate a legally permitted ingredient, and it must be supported by evidence held in the product information file. A palm free claim generally passes the first test, because it addresses a documented consumer choice rather than implying palm is unsafe, and it passes the second only if you hold the declarations.

Defensible wording, with declarations on file: "formulated without palm oil or palm derived ingredients", or simply "palm free". Not defensible: "rainforest friendly", "no palm, no deforestation", or any wording that implies a measured environmental outcome, because that is an environmental benefit claim and needs evidence of the benefit itself, not of the absence of an ingredient. In the United States the equivalent constraint is the FTC's guidance on environmental marketing claims, which treats broad unqualified benefit claims as difficult to substantiate.

Keep four records for every finished batch: the dated origin declaration per material, the specification or certificate of analysis, the bill of materials linking that batch code to those specific lots, and a note of the date the declarations were last refreshed. In the UK and EU these belong in the product information file alongside the safety assessment, and the surrounding obligations are covered in selling balms in the UK and EU.

The limit of what this page can settle for you: it can tell you which materials to interrogate and give you a formula that avoids all of them, but it cannot verify your suppliers, and the claim is only ever as good as the weakest declaration behind it. If a supplier will not put an origin in writing, the answer is not to assume, and it is not to make the claim quietly. It is to change the material or drop the claim.

Reviewed and updated 6 September 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix and log it.