Palm oil, stearin and olein: the fraction decides everything

Palm oil melts at 33 to 40 C and palm stearin at 48 to 56 C. Fractionation explained, use at 5 to 20 percent, plus what RSPO mass balance really certifies.

"Palm oil" on a supplier list can mean four materials with melting points spread across nearly forty degrees. Buy the wrong one and a balm either slumps in a warm room or sets like a candle. This page separates the fractions by melting point and fatty acid profile, explains the graininess that palm systems are prone to, and sets out what each RSPO certification model actually entitles you to say.

• INCI: Elaeis Guineensis Oil
• Palmitic 39-48%
• Iodine value 50-55
• Stearin slips at 48-56 C
• Beta prime crystalliser

One fruit, four commercial fats

The oil palm, Elaeis guineensis, yields two chemically unrelated oils from the same fruit. The orange fleshy mesocarp gives palm oil, which is roughly half saturated and dominated by palmitic acid. The hard seed inside gives palm kernel oil, which is a lauric fat closer to coconut than to its own mesocarp. Nothing about one predicts the other.

Palm oil is then fractionated, which is not hydrogenation and not chemical modification. It is controlled crystallisation: cool the melted oil slowly to about 20 to 25 C under gentle agitation, let the high melting triglycerides crystallise, and filter them off. The solid cake is palm stearin, the liquid filtrate is palm olein. Dry fractionation uses nothing but temperature and a membrane press. Solvent and detergent fractionation exist industrially and give sharper cuts, but dry fractionation supplies most of what a small maker buys. Repeated fractionation of the olein gives superolein and the mid fraction used in cocoa butter equivalents.

The names are unfortunately loose in the cosmetic trade. INCI Elaeis Guineensis Oil covers whole palm oil, Elaeis Guineensis Butter and Elaeis Guineensis Oil are both used for stearin depending on the supplier, and Elaeis Guineensis Kernel Oil is the kernel fat. Some resellers label stearin simply as "palm wax" or "palm butter". Ask for the iodine value and the slip melting point rather than trusting the name, as covered in sourcing ingredients.

Melting points by fraction, and the method behind them

Every number below is a slip melting point unless stated, measured by the open capillary method (AOCS Cc 3-25): a column of fat in a tube is warmed until the plug slips. It is not the same measurement as a clear point or a DSC peak, which is why supplier figures often disagree by two or three degrees with the ones you might read elsewhere. The method matters more here than for a wax, because these fats melt over a wide band rather than at a point. The distinction is set out in melting point methods.

Codex publishes 44.5 to 56 C for palm stearin, a wider band than the 48 to 56 C most cosmetic suppliers quote, because Codex has to cover soft stearins from single fractionation as well as hard double fractionated grades. If you buy stearin without a certificate of analysis, assume it could be anywhere in the wider band, which is a four percent swing in how much you need. The solid fat content column is the more useful predictor of feel, and the reasoning behind that is in solid fat content.

Fatty acid profile, and what palmitic acid does

Palm oil is the only common balm fat where palmitic acid rather than stearic or oleic dominates. Palmitic is a sixteen carbon saturate, two carbons shorter than the stearic acid that gives shea and cocoa their structure, and the difference shows on the skin. Palmitic rich fats lay down a film that feels dry and firm rather than slippery, with noticeably less glide than an oleic rich butter. That is useful in a lotion bar or a barrier balm and a liability in a massage balm.

The iodine value of 50 to 55 is the other number worth carrying. It puts palm well below sunflower (around 120) or hemp (around 160) and comfortably above cocoa butter (33 to 42). With only 9 to 12 percent linoleic acid and almost no linolenic, palm is oxidatively stable: expect eighteen to twenty four months in a cool dark cupboard, and longer for stearin, which has less linoleic still. That is genuinely long by comparison with the polyunsaturate rich oils in the oil comparison table.

Crude red palm oil carries 500 to 700 mg per kg of carotenoids and a similar order of tocotrienols. Both are stripped by refining. The pigment is a strong orange that will tint a balm and stain a light fabric, so if you use red palm oil, use it because you want that colour, and expect the carotene to fade under light as any natural pigment does.

Palm kernel oil is not palm oil

Palm kernel oil, INCI Elaeis Guineensis Kernel Oil, is a lauric fat: 45 to 55 percent lauric acid, 14 to 18 percent myristic, and only 6 to 10 percent palmitic. Its iodine value of 14 to 21 makes it one of the most saturated fats in commerce, and its saponification value of roughly 230 to 254 is far above palm oil's 190 to 209, which matters if you are calculating anything from a supplier's SAP figure.

Functionally it behaves like coconut oil: it melts across a narrow band just below body temperature, so it goes from solid to thin liquid almost at once. That sharp transition gives a cooling, fast disappearing feel with very little residue. It also means it contributes almost no structure at skin temperature, which is the opposite of what stearin does. Substituting one for the other because both say palm on the drum is the single most common error with these materials.

Use levels and the film it leaves

Whole palm oil works at 10 to 20 percent of a balm, palm stearin at 5 to 15 percent, and stearin above about 20 percent starts to feel like a candle. The reason is the melting point relative to skin. Whole palm sits at 33 to 40 C, straddling skin surface temperature of roughly 32 to 34 C, so it is half melted by the time it has been rubbed in. Stearin at 48 to 56 C never melts on the skin at all: it is spread mechanically as a solid film, which is why it delivers structure without greasiness and why too much of it drags.

Where palm stearin earns its place is heat resistance without wax. Raising beeswax to hold a bar together in summer makes it draggy and dull; adding five points of stearin raises the solid fat content at 30 C while leaving the wax network alone. If your problem is a product arriving soft, work through balm melting in the heat before reaching for more wax. Where it fails is glide: pair it with an ester or with castor oil rather than adding more of it.

Graininess and post-hardening

Palm fats crystallise predominantly in the beta prime polymorph, which is the good one: small, densely packed crystals that read as smooth. That is why palm stearin is used industrially in margarine, where beta prime is the target. The problem is that beta prime is metastable, and over weeks a palm system can convert to the coarse beta form, throwing gritty crystals up to 20 or 30 micrometres across. The palate and the fingertip both detect grit at roughly that size, which is why the fault appears suddenly rather than gradually. The polymorph sequence is explained in fat crystal polymorphism.

Palm brings a second complication that shea does not: a diacylglycerol content of roughly 4 to 8 percent, high for a commercial fat. Diglycerides interfere with crystal packing, which slows nucleation and prolongs crystallisation for days after the balm feels set. This is post-hardening, and it is real. A palm rich balm poured on Monday can be measurably firmer the following Monday, which makes any hardness judgement taken on day one misleading.

The controls are the same ones that fix grainy shea butter, applied a little harder. Heat the full melt to 70 to 80 C and hold twenty minutes to erase crystal memory, since surviving high melting crystal fragments seed the coarse form. Then cool fast through the crystallisation window rather than letting the pot drift down overnight: a cold water bath or twenty minutes in a fridge, not a freezer. Fast cooling favours many small nuclei, slow cooling favours few large ones, which is the whole argument in crystallisation and cooling rate. Pour temperature matters too, and the windows are in pour temperatures.

What the RSPO certification models let you say

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil runs four supply chain models. They differ in how physically connected your drum is to a certified plantation, and therefore in what you may print. Confusing them is the commonest sustainability claim error in small cosmetics.

The practical trap is mass balance. Buying RSPO mass balance palm stearin does not entitle you to write "made with certified sustainable palm oil" on a tin, because the material in that tin is not certified. The permitted wording is a mixed claim, and RSPO specifies the form. Book and claim is further removed again: the honest sentence is that you have contributed to the production of certified sustainable palm oil, not that your product contains any.

Separately, the EU Deforestation Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2023/1115) brings palm oil and a long list of derivatives, including glycerol and industrial fatty acids, into a due diligence regime for goods placed on the EU market. Its application dates have been amended more than once since it was adopted, and micro and small enterprises were given a later start than large operators, so check the current position before assuming it does or does not apply to you. It is a traceability duty, not a certification scheme, and RSPO membership does not discharge it.

Palm you did not know you were buying

INCI names describe chemistry, not botanical source, so a formula can be palm derived without the word palm appearing anywhere. The usual suspects are worth knowing.

None of these are declarable as palm on a label, and no regulator requires the source to be disclosed. The only way to know is to ask the supplier for a botanical origin statement and file it. If you are making a palm free claim, that paperwork is the claim's entire substantiation, and it has to cover every input, not just the obvious fats. The wider point about what INCI does and does not tell you is in INCI names explained.

Going palm free, and what it costs

The performance gap is real but narrow. Palm stearin's closest substitutes are shea stearin, which behaves similarly and costs more, and the hard butters: cocoa butter at 34 to 38 C, kokum at around 39 to 41 C, and illipe and sal, which are the two closest in melting point and hardness. Each brings its own problems. Cocoa is brittle and smells of chocolate unless deodorised. Kokum is the least grain prone of the hard butters but costs several times what palm does. Shea grains readily. Hydrogenated castor oil, at 85 to 88 C, is a structurant of a different class and will make a balm hard rather than firm. The comparative numbers are collected in butters compared, and a full worked substitution is in palm free balm.

Expect a palm free reformulation to cost somewhere between twenty and eighty percent more on the hard fat line, depending on what you switch to, and to need a second look at grain control because most of the alternatives are more grain prone than palm, not less. You may also need slightly more of the substitute, since kokum and illipe are not exact melting point matches for stearin.

The environmental argument is less one sided than the marketing implies. 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, so palm supplies about a third of the world's vegetable oil from under a tenth of its oil crop land. Replacing it with a lower yielding crop moves land use rather than reducing it. The defensible positions are two: buy segregated or identity preserved certified palm and say so accurately, or go palm free and be honest that it is a supply chain and consumer preference decision rather than a demonstrated environmental improvement.

The decision rule

Choose by melting point, not by name. If you want a fat that gives body but still melts on the skin, whole palm oil at 33 to 40 C does that job at 10 to 20 percent and costs less than any butter that competes with it. If you want structure that survives a hot delivery van, palm stearin at 48 to 56 C does it at 5 to 15 percent without the drag that extra wax would bring. If you want a fast, clean, non-greasy melt, you want a lauric fat, and palm kernel oil or coconut is the answer. Nothing about the word palm tells you which of those three you are holding.

The honest limits: palm is a low glide fat that will make a massage or lip product feel dry if overdosed, it post-hardens for a week or more so it is slow to develop, it is more prone to slow polymorphic graining than kokum or cocoa, and its supply chain carries reputational weight that no amount of formulation skill addresses. If you cannot get a written origin statement and at minimum a mass balance certificate from your supplier, and you sell to a market that asks, the cost of the alternatives is the cheaper problem. Cost the swap properly with the cost calculator before you decide.

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