Does lipstick have whale blubber in it?

Answer 1

In the very old days when there was still an American whaling trade, the most popular whale to kill was the sperm whale. These whales have a big chamber in their heads that holds a wax called spermaceti. There's no sperm in it and the chamber is in both male and female whales, but whalers went after this whale because the six thousand pounds of spermaceti in the head of one whale was worth more than the entire rest of the whale. In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, there's a chapter about how the spermaceti was harvested: they beheaded the whale, tied it to the side of the ship, cut a hole in the spermaceti chamber and dipped out the spermaceti. The same book tells of a whaleman who fell into the chamber and had to be rescued. Today, they don't make lipstick from spermaceti for three reasons--you can't get it anymore, if you could there would be international outrage directed against your company for using it, and jojoba oil happens to have the same chemical composition as spermaceti and is safer to gather as well.

Answer 2

No.

The product you are thinking of is "spermaceti," which is a fat stored in a cavity in a sperm whale's head. Apparently both male and female sperm whales produce this product. Since you can't fish for sperm whales anymore, they've found plant-based substitutes for it.

Answer 3

No. Lip gloss has no whale products at all in it.

The chemical in question is "cetyl palmitate," which is also called spermaceti--and it's found in a LOT of cosmetics. It's a fatty stuff, and in the old days when it was still legal to fish for whales they got it from a chamber, which is called the "tun," in the head of a sperm whale. (The part of the whale the sperm used in reproduction comes from is not in the head of the whale, and both male and female sperm whales produce spermaceti.) If you read Moby-Dick, you will learn that the way to get the spermaceti out of a whale head is to kill a whale, tow it back to the whaling ship, cut the head off and hang it nose-down from the side of the ship. (Oh...because these guys were out there trying to get spermaceti, which was expensive, and not whale meat or whalebone, they threw the rest of the whale to the sharks.) Then you got one crewman to get on the head, cut a hole in the tun with an axe, and dip the spermaceti out with a bucket. Which doesn't sound like all that great of a way to make a living to me, but people did it.

Today, cetyl palmitate comes from Jojoba beans. This has many advantages: you don't have to kill a whale to get it, it's a lot less expensive, and no Jojoba plant ever turned around after you picked the beans off it and dragged you 300 feet below the surface of the ocean--which sperm whales have been known to do. You also don't have to crawl around inside the head of a dead whale.

Answer 4

No.

Yes, there is whale blubber in some lipsticks.

Answer 5

No, it would be terribly difficult to collect for starters.

Answer 6

whale blubber

Answer 7

whale sperm

Answer 8

Yes