Whitening Beeswax

I recently bought some beeswax to be used as my encaustic medium. Normally I would just use it in its natural color, but lately I've been wanting to refine the wax for more intense depth of color from the pigments. Using yellow wax definitely requires more pigment and never produces the brightness that a colorless wax could. Additionally, using colorless wax allows artists to create translucent layers in works without using paraffin wax.

There is more than one way of lightening or whitening wax. One way is melting, filtering, and pouring thin sheets of wax, leaving it in the sun for natural bleaching. Lightening should not result in the loss of that wonderful honey aroma of the wax. Another way is to add hydrogen peroxide to melted wax after filtering.

Pure beeswax should be filtered if you don't intend to use it in its natural state since fragments of bee parts and other hive debris are usually suspended in the hardened wax.