Cambridge Traditional Beeswax Wooden Furniture Polish Cream Neutral 142g
Cambridge Traditional Products Beeswax Furniture Polish Neutral
is suitable for natural woods and veneers, our beeswax furniture polish does not contain silicones, propellant gases or synthetic solvents. Silicones cause blooming on natural wood, whilst propellant gases and synthetic solvents are bad for the environment.
The neutral polish can be used on any wood, light or dark, without changing the colour of the wood.
Size: 142g
This beeswax polish will help restore beauty to furniture from the past, whilst caring for, feeding, protecting and enhancing natural woods and veneers of today. Cambridge Products believe our ancestors knew more about caring for natural wood than modern chemists. So, they use an original, traditional 19th century Victorian recipe that was rediscovered in 1979 by Adrian Perkins, the Founder of Cambridge Traditional Products. To this day, they faithfully follow that original recipe, using natural ingredients - mainly natural beeswax and natural turpentine.
The polish is a cream, unlike most of the available beeswax furniture polishes which are pastes. A cream has several advantages:
+ It is easier to use - needing less 'elbow grease'
+ It cannot produce unsightly build up
+ Remnants of paste polish caught up in nooks and crannies will set like concrete. This cannot happen with our cream polish
+ A little of our polish goes a very long way.
It contains no toxic and allergenic toluene. The solvent we use is pure gum turpentine, a natural product itself - being distilled pine sap. The process of producing turpentine does no harm to the trees; it is 'tapped' like rubber.
Produced by lots of bees - and Cambridge Traditional Products!
Usage Instructions: The instructions for use are simplicity itself: apply sparingly, working with the grain of the wood, and buff with a soft cloth. Used regularly, all your furniture will take on a warm silky glow.
About Cambridge Traditional Beeswax: Our traditional beeswax furniture polishes are made to an original 19th Century recipe. They are made from "natural" ingredients, although it is not possible to pin down a watertight definition of "natural" in the context of manufactured products. The principle ingredients of the polishes are beeswax, turpentine and water, and these are clearly all natural:
Beeswax is made by bees. What we use is exactly what the bees make. The only thing we do to it before using it to make the polish is to filter out the pollen, general dirt and the occasional dead bee.
Turpentine is distilled pine sap. The sap is "tapped" from pine trees rather like latex from rubber trees. The trees are not destroyed in the process, and they are "farmed" in this way over many years.
The other ingredients are soap, paraffin wax and, (in the brown version of the polish), dyes. These, perhaps, can lay less claim to being natural.
Soap used by us is entirely made from vegetable oils (no animal products are used).
Paraffin wax is also in the recipe as this acts as a lubricant, and is one of the reasons why the polish is so easy to use It does not detract in any way from the full benefits of the beeswax. Paraffin wax is a petro-chemical product. However there are places in the world where it exudes naturally from the ground. On this basis one could perhaps claim it to be a natural product - but we don't!
Dyes: Very small amounts of two wax-soluble dyes are added to the brown version to produce the colour. These dyes are not natural products.
The neutral polish is made exactly to the original Victorian recipe. We have not attempted to change this in any way since our ancestors knew a great deal more about how to care for wood than today's industrial chemists do. However, the brown version, with the added dyes, is our own modification, produced in response to demand for a brown version.
The hazard warning label is legally required on the polish because it contains turpentine. The wording of the label is legally required to be exactly the same as for neat turpentine. Turpentine is regarded as a hazardous substance for the following reasons:
+ It is flammable (although, in its diluted form in the polish, if you drop a lighted match on to the polish in the jar, all that happens is that the match goes out!)
+ Long-term exposure to the fumes from heated turpentine can cause lung damage. This simply does not apply in using the made up polish.
+ Contact with the skin can cause irritation in some people, so it ought be a sensible precaution to wear rubber gloves when applying the polish. Any residual turpentine on polished furniture completely evaporates off within 20 minutes of polishing. Many of the alternative solvents found in polishes are substantially more allergenic.
+ It is poisonous - so please don't eat the polish!
+ It is harmful to aquatic organisms - so if you should decide to empty your jar into a pond, stream or lake, you will undoubtedly kill some fish.