How we test and calculate
The provenance of every class of number on Trebalm: melting points, fatty acid profiles, formula windows, container yields, and the values we calculate ourselves.
Most of the arguments about balms are really arguments about numbers, so it is worth being explicit about where ours come from. This page covers each class of figure on the site, its source, and how much weight it will bear.
Melting points and material properties
Quoted as ranges for commercial grades. Natural fats and waxes do not have melting points in the way that a pure compound does; they have melting ranges, and the figure a supplier prints depends on which method was used (drop point, slip point, congeal point and clear point all give different answers for the same material). Where a page depends on the distinction, it says which one it means. Shea butter is the clearest example: its slip point is around 32 C, but the crystals that cause graininess do not fully melt until 41 to 43 C, which is why "melt it until it looks liquid" is not enough.
Fatty acid profiles
Where an oil has an international standard, we use it: Codex Alimentarius CXS 210-1999 for named vegetable oils and CXS 33-1981 for olive oil. These give ranges from authentic samples by gas chromatography, which is exactly what we want. Where an oil has no standard, we use peer-reviewed analyses and quote a wider range, and the page notes that the values are not from a standard. Cultivar, season and refining all move these figures, so a single number for any oil is misleading.
Formula percentage windows
Three sources, weighted in this order: published supplier formulation cards from wax and ester manufacturers, which represent actual industrial practice; the Cosmetic Ingredient Review's use-concentration surveys, which record what is really in products on shelves; and craft practice, which is useful for what home makers can achieve but is unsourced and often internally inconsistent. Where these disagree we say so. They frequently do, and the disagreement is usually informative.
Numbers we calculate ourselves
A significant part of Trebalm's value is resolving craft recipes into weight percentages, because most of them are written in mixed units and nobody has done the arithmetic. When we do this we state every assumption:
| Quantity | Value used | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Carrier oil density | 0.911 to 0.916 g/mL | Codex olive oil standard, used as a proxy for common seed oils, which sit in the same band |
| Finished balm density | 0.92 g/mL | Working figure for converting container volume to fill weight |
| Beeswax pastille bulk density | about 0.59 g/mL | Measured value, corroborated by physics: it implies a 60% packing fraction against a solid density near 0.98 |
| One US cup of oil | 215.5 to 216.7 g | 236.588 mL at the density above |
| Batch overage | 8 to 15% | What stays in the pot, jug and spatula in practice |
These constants are also what the calculators use, so a result from a tool and a figure in an article will always agree.
Sensory and workshop rankings
Some things that matter to a maker have no published instrumental dataset: relative slip, drag, cushion, payoff, perceived hardness, graininess risk. Where we rank materials on these, the ranking is Trebalm's editorial judgement, derived from published composition and from the points on which experienced makers and supplier technical literature consistently agree. It is not something we have measured, and the page says so wherever it appears. We do not dress an ordinal judgement up as a measurement, and we do not attach decimal places to it.
What we do not do
We do not run a laboratory. Trebalm does not perform gas chromatography, penetrometry, challenge testing, stability chambers or clinical work, and no page claims otherwise. Every measured number on this site came from somebody else's measurement, and we tell you whose. Where a question can only be settled by a measurement nobody has published, we say that the question is open. That happens more often in this subject than you would expect: there is no peer-reviewed study of cosmetic shea graininess, no published comedogenicity data for beeswax, and no published water activity measurements for common cosmetic butters and waxes.
How pages are reviewed
Every article is checked against the shared dataset before publication, so that no page contradicts another. Regulatory pages are re-checked against primary sources on a schedule and carry the date they were last verified. When a reader reports an error we check it against sources rather than against our own previous wording, and if we were wrong the fix is logged on the corrections page.
The rules behind all of this are set out in our editorial standards.