Super Golden: How the Finest Button Lac in the World Gets Made

Every year since 1990 this bench has bought its button lac from one refining family in eastern India, now in its fifth generation. Most of what they make for us is the classic grade — Kusmi #1, the button the old French polishers would recognize. Twice a year, for a few weeks, the same family makes a run that goes further than the classic grade at every single step. We call it Super Golden. It comes in two harvests — Hemanta in winter and Aruna in summer — and I think it is the finest hand-made button lac available anywhere. This is the story of how it gets made, and why nothing else on the market is quite like it.

Start with the tree

Shellac begins as a resin secreted by a tiny insect on the twigs of a host tree. Which tree, and which season, decides a great deal about what ends up in your jar. The Kusum tree gives the lac the trade regards as the best there is: naturally lighter in color, and with more life — the working time a cut shellac keeps before it starts to polymerize in the jar. The refinery's own lab puts Kusmi lac at up to fifty percent more life than other varieties, which is why it has always been the one finishers ask for by name.

The winter Kusum harvest — December into January — is the smaller of the two, and the lighter. That is Hemanta; the name is the Sanskrit word for the season, and the refinery's owner told me he liked it because it describes both the time of year and the color. The summer harvest from the same trees, June into August, runs a shade redder. That is Aruna, the Sanskrit dawn. Same tree, same family, same method. The only difference between the two is the season the twigs were cut.

Selection, before anything else

Sticklac — the raw resin still on the twig — arrives at the refinery in grades, like anything harvested by hand. For the Super Golden run the family selects only superior lots, and only from the current season. That last part matters more than it sounds. Fresh lac carries its natural dye loosely, and the dye washes out; as lac ages the dye hardens into the resin and no amount of washing will lift it. A button made from this year's crop is lighter than the same recipe run on last year's, and there is no way to fake that later.

Then the lac is broken up, ground, and sieved. The classic grades pass a 4-mesh screen. Super Golden passes an 8-mesh — twice as fine — and the reason is simple: the larger granules are the ones that carry the most dye and the most dirt. Sieve finer and you throw more away. What's left is cleaner before the first wash has even begun.

Washed three times

Washing is where seedlac is made. The ground lac is agitated in water with washing soda, which lifts sand, dust, twigs, insect bodies, and — the point of the exercise — the red lac dye. Kusmi #2 is washed once. Kusmi #1 is washed twice, about an hour more. Super Golden is washed three times.

Each wash makes the lac a little lighter and a little purer, and each wash costs yield: the finer particles slip away in the water and never come back. Nobody triple-washes lac because it is efficient. They do it because it is the only honest way to get a button this pale without bleaching it, and nothing in this process is bleached. Washing soda is the only thing that ever touches it.

Made by hand, over a wood fire

The washed and dried seedlac goes to a family of button makers the refinery has worked with for a very long time — the same hands that press our Kusmi #1. Button lac is a cottage craft and has never been anything else. The seedlac is loaded into a long cotton tube, stretched over a wood fire, and twisted as it heats. The molten lac is squeezed out through the cloth, which strains it one last time, and dropped onto a flat surface where it spreads and hardens into the round, slightly domed button you know from the jar. The wax that the insect built into the resin — about two to three percent of it — stays in. That is why a button dissolves to a faintly cloudy cut and why it polishes the way it does. Button lac is shellac in its historically authentic form, and a true button is partially dewaxed by the fire and the cloth and nothing else.

This is slow work. A day's pressing is measured in kilos, not tons, and the result is as good as the seedlac that went into it, which is why the refinery controls that part itself: the family presses only the lac the refinery hands them, from lots it washed, so what comes back is the same from one batch to the next.

What is not in it

Here is the part of the story that explains the price, and the part that matters most at the bench.

A great deal of the button lac sold in the trade is cut with rosin. Rosin is cheap, it melts and presses like shellac, and once it is in a button it is nearly impossible to detect, even in a lab. It also builds a softer, less water-resistant film that never quite polishes the way pure lac does. Finishers who have been disappointed by button lac have, more often than not, been disappointed by rosin.

Every button we sell is guaranteed 100% shellac. No rosin. No fillers. No dyes. No bleaching. The refinery knows that is the only button lac we will buy, and has never once sent us anything else. That guarantee is the whole reason to buy a button from us rather than from a jar with no name on it, and it holds for the entire line — Kusmi #1 and #2, Light and Dark Jethwa, Bysakhi — not only the Super Golden.

Where the Super Golden sits in the family

If you are new to buttons, start with Kusmi #1. It is the classic — what Lemon #1 is to flake, Kusmi #1 is to buttons — and it will make a beautiful French polish all day long. Dark Jethwa is the same summer harvest as Aruna, washed less so more of the natural dye stays in: a warm red-brown for period color. Bysakhi is the spring harvest from one specific region, darker again.

Reach for Hemanta or Aruna when the shellac itself is part of what people will see: a pale heirloom polish, a figured top, an instrument, any piece where you want warmth and depth and nothing muddying it. Hemanta is the paler of the two, Aruna has the blush of red the summer crop carries. On a dark wood you may never tell them apart. On curly maple you will.

Mixing is the same as any button: break it up, cover it with alcohol, give it a day. The pound cut chart has the weights, and About Button Shellac covers the rest of the how.

We're proud to bring exceptional natural finishes like these buttons to the craftspeople who appreciate them, and to be part of a tradition that goes back centuries.

— Gregg