The Wax Was Never the Problem

Ask a woodworking forum which shellac to buy and you will get one answer, fast. Dewaxed. Always dewaxed. Waxy shellac won’t take a topcoat, it’s cloudy, it’s the old stuff, nobody uses it anymore.

I sell both kinds, so I had a stake in the question, and I was curious how this particular truism became so sticky. I assumed the answer to all of my questions was "money". This week I went looking, back through old books, trade magazines, data sheets, and twenty years of forum posts, to see whether the assumption held up.

It did, but not the way I expected.

What the old trade knew

Start with what the rule is not. It is not old craft wisdom.

Richard Bitmead’s French Polishing and Enamelling, 1910, is the standard period text on the pad. The word “dewaxed” does not appear in it anywhere. The only refined grade he discusses is bleached. Wax comes up when he talks about beeswax finishing, never as a thing to take out of shellac.

Dewaxed shellac did exist. It was an industrial grade. By 1930 the ASTM already had a test method for wax content in shellac. Trade journals in the 1930s and 40s describe refined dewaxed shellac as a base for high-grade lacquers, recommended where a job needed the utmost paleness and clarity. And in the early 1950s William Zinsser & Co. was advertising a “wax-free” dewaxed liquid shellac called Zinflex to lacquer formulators, with claims of better adhesion to metal. So the idea that wax-free shellac is clearer and sticks a little better to certain things is real, and it is more than seventy years old. It belongs to industry. It was never a rule for furniture.

The furniture trade said the opposite. A 1969 paint technology textbook, still in print in the 1980s, puts it plainly: for many purposes, French polish for example, the presence of wax in shellac is an advantage. A Fine Woodworking collection from the same era calls shellac wax a natural plasticizer that gives the film flexibility. When George Frank wrote up a true French polish for Fine Woodworking in 1986, he padded with superfine orange flake. Waxy. Adhesion never came up, because there was nothing to adhere. The shellac was the finish.

Step one: the polyurethane can

So where did the worry come from? Not from shellac people. From the polyurethane companies.

In the 1970s the makers of polyurethane varnish put a blanket warning on the can: do not apply over shellac. Not waxy shellac. Any shellac. The syndicated home-repair columns of the day repeated the label. A 1975 Washington Post column: if it’s polyurethane varnish, it should not be used over shellac or any other finish. Sunset’s 1977 finishing book: never use a polyurethane varnish over shellac. That was the rule for a decade, cruder than the one we have now. There was no loophole yet.

Dewaxed flake was still a curiosity. George Frank, in 1981, describes dissolving “a new type of shellac, refined, dewaxed, powdered shellac” as though his readers would not have seen it.

Step two: the authors write the loophole

The loophole was written in the 1990s by the finishing authors, and they wrote it carefully.

Bob Flexner’s Understanding Wood Finishing, 1994, is the earliest categorical instruction I can find in a mass-market woodworking book: use fresh shellac, and use dewaxed shellac under any finish except lacquer. Jeff Jewitt’s Hand-Applied Finishes, 1997, says to use only a dewaxed shellac to avoid possible adhesion problems. Andy Charron’s books on spray and water-based finishing recommend a barrier coat of dewaxed shellac between a stain and a waterborne topcoat. Michael Dresdner’s 1992 Woodfinishing Book told readers to buy dewaxed flakes, but his reason was shelf life, not adhesion.

Notice how narrow they are. Every one is about putting something else on top of shellac. Polyurethane. Waterborne. Not lacquer, which Flexner exempts in the same sentence, and not shellac itself. They took the polyurethane makers’ blanket ban and found the exception that let shellac stay in the shop. That was a reasonable thing to write.

But notice one more thing. In 2000, Jewitt’s Great Wood Finishes carried a reader question: why isn’t dewaxed premixed shellac available? The answer was that nobody made one. Dewaxed shellac in a can went bad too fast. The authors had written a rule around a product that did not exist on the consumer shelf.

Step three: the product

It existed within the year. In September 2001 the trade magazine FDM listed a new product from Zinsser: Bulls Eye SealCoat, a universal sanding sealer, dewaxed, compatible with all clear finishes. The data sheet still says it that way: 100% dewaxed, compatible with ALL clear finishes, made by a patented process that guarantees shelf life.

Here is the part that made my guess feel right. Pick up the data sheet for Zinsser’s regular Bulls Eye shellac, the waxy one, and it tells you it is not recommended under polyurethane. To seal wood before polyurethane, it says, use Bulls Eye SealCoat. The company’s own waxy product sends you to the company’s own dewaxed product. That is the closed loop, in print, from the only company that mattered.

And it mattered because by then Zinsser was nearly the only game left. The market for liquid shellac in this country had shrunk to one supplier, and that supplier is a sealer and primer house. Bob Flexner, who has watched this business longer than anyone else writing about it, put it on the record in 2012: “Seeing its market disappearing, Zinsser… with the help of some woodworking writers, turned shellac into a sealer, even introducing a dewaxed variety (SealCoat).” And again in 2017: “Zinsser specializes in sealers and primers, so it markets the shellac as a sealer. The marketing strategy as I have experienced it centers on getting influential magazine and book writers to recommend shellac as a sealer.”

I want to be fair about what that is and isn’t. I found no evidence that any author was paid. Nothing suggests a plan drawn up in a room. Dresdner recommended SealCoat by name in three books because it was easier and cheaper and kept longer, all of which is true. Jewitt wrote the most-cited article in favor of dewaxed because, as far as I can tell, he believes it. What happened is duller than a conspiracy. A company with one product to save found a new use for it, good writers described that use accurately, and the label copy went from can to catalog to forum without anyone changing a word.

Step four: the forums finish the job

By the mid-2000s the narrow rule had lost its qualifiers. A 2005 Fine Woodworking forum thread says polyurethane and many lacquers won’t adhere to waxed shellac, and one dissenter notes that waxy rubs out a little easier. By 2008 a thread on the same forum reads: you must use a dewaxed shellac under a waterborne clear coat. Nobody argues. Dresdner, asked in 2007 how to dewax shellac at home, told the reader to skip it and buy SealCoat. Somewhere in there “dewaxed under poly” became “dewaxed, always,” and then “waxy is the old stuff.”

The odd thing is that the authors never claimed that. Jewitt’s 2014 Fine Woodworking article, the one everyone links, says plainly that regular shellac is fine under nitrocellulose lacquer or oil-based varnish. The dogma’s own sources concede the exceptions. 

And the evidence for the core claim is thinner than the confidence around it. I could not find a single published test measuring polyurethane adhesion against the wax content of shellac. What I did find was a 2008 WOODWEB thread where a woodworker ran a cross-hatch tape test on polyurethane over waxy shellac and reported that nothing came loose. Flexner, for his part, calls the reasoning behind SealCoat “absurd,” because polyurethane needs no sealer at all. That is one man’s word against a can label. But he wrote the book.

The clarity claim

The other thing you’ll hear is that dewaxed is clearer. Technically, yes. Shellac carries three to five percent wax; dewaxed grades carry under half a percent. In the jar the waxy cut is cloudy and the dewaxed cut is not. Jewitt wrote in 2000 that the wax reduces clarity and slightly lowers water resistance, and I don’t dispute the chemistry.

I dispute that it matters at the bench. A conservator I took a class with this summer works with nothing but waxy Lemon #1 flake. Those finishes are the best I have ever seen, and they came without a fight. If the wax were clouding the work I would have seen it. A French polisher in Greece, in an essay that I read this week, tells beginners to start with ordinary waxy shellac for exactly that reason: the wax acts as a plasticizer and makes the varnish easier to apply with the pad. That is what the 1969 textbook said, and what Frank was doing in 1986. Three people, three generations, three countries, no marketing department.

Exhibit A

I will close with something I read this week on a specialist shellac retailer’s FAQ. Asked the advantage of waxed versus dewaxed, it answers, in short: dewaxed can be used under all top coats, which is unique among finishing materials; dewaxed gives a clearer finish; and there is little reason to use waxy shellac these days unless you want button lac for its color or hardness, in which case you would take the wax out yourself. Then the last line: button lac is sold mostly for those doing French polishing.

Every stage of the story is in that paragraph. The “all top coats” line is SealCoat’s label copy, twenty-five years on. “Clearer” is true and small. “Little reason these days” is the forum version. And the final sentence hands back the entire traditional use of the material without noticing it has done so. 

That is what a convenient simplification looks like once it has hardened. Not a lie. A true, narrow rule that forgot it was narrow.

The narrow true version

So here is the rule, the whole rule, with nothing added to it.

If you are going to put oil-based polyurethane or a waterborne finish over your shellac, use dewaxed. The risk is small and the cost of avoiding it is nothing.

If you are going to put lacquer, oil varnish, wax, or more shellac over it, it does not matter. The authors of the rule say so themselves.

For my part, I tend to use button lac in most circumstances. Dewaxed shellac is a fine product, and ours is the best there is. I do use it as a "sealer" sometimes. But something about the wholeness of button lac appeals to me: the history, simple refining process, complex polymerization chemistry. It resonates with me in a way that isn't captured with the predictable perfect refinement of dewaxed shellac.

And if the shellac is the finish, buttons and waxy flake are what the trade used for a hundred and fifty years, and the wax is part of why they pad the way they do.