Hemanta Button Lac

Hemanta is the most selective Super Golden button we have ever carried. Take everything that makes Kusmi #1 the finishers' button — the warmth, the clarity, the way it builds under a pad — and push every step of its making further. Hemanta starts with Kusmi sticklac from a single winter harvest (the name is the Sanskrit season), sieved to a fine mesh that leaves the larger, darker, dirtier granules behind, triple-washed, and pressed warm through cloth by hand in one small run. Each of those steps lifts color and lifts purity. Each one costs yield. What's left is the palest, cleanest, most even golden button on the bench — Kusmi #1 taken to the finish the old masters only imagined.

This is the grade for the work where the shellac itself is part of what you see: fine furniture, instrument tops and bodies, the pale heirloom French polish where you want warmth and depth and nothing muddying it.

Hemanta is 100% shellac — no rosin, no additives, nothing cut in. It is button lac in the historically authentic form, partially dewaxed the traditional way, with roughly two to three percent of the natural wax left in the structure. One harvest, one run; when this lot is gone, the next is a year away.

Mixing notes: see the pound cut chart for dry weight per gallon, quart, and pint at the common working cuts.

Sourced direct from a fifth-generation refining family in India who has supplied this bench since 1990. Pure, uncut, genuine.