Seedlac

Seedlac, the rawest form — pure, uncut, before any further processing.

Everything else on this site begins here. Before the press, before the melt, before any sheet of flake or molten button, the resin arrives as seedlac — small irregular granules washed out of the harvested encrustation and dried in open air. It is what the cottage producers buy when they buy starting material. It is what the refineries load into their bags when they make button lac. Every other form of shellac is downstream of it.

The harvesters work in the forests of Jharkhand and West Bengal, on host trees the lac insect has been feeding on for as long as anyone has written it down. The insect secretes its resin shell around the twig and lays its eggs inside. The encrusted branches are cut and broken into sticklac, then crushed, sieved to clear the bark and debris, washed, and air-dried. What comes out the other end is seedlac. No melt, no press, no solvent — only the resin the insect made, separated from the host tree and the impurities and dried.

That is the shellac on this page.

Why some finishers buy it this way

Most people who reach for shellac want it already refined into a known form. Seedlac is for the others — the practitioners who want to start one step earlier. Some dissolve it themselves to make their own cuts at whatever strength a particular job asks for. Some filter it through their own cloth and cones to control the finish of the strain. Some are studying the material directly: what the wax in unrefined shellac does in solution, how the natural color sits in alcohol before any heat has touched it, what the original starting point of every classical finishing recipe actually looks like in the hand.

The audience overlaps with French polishers and antique restorers, but it extends further — to the experimenters, the researchers, the small finishing shops who learned the craft by working backward from the finished material to the granule. Seedlac is the shellac for that work.

What it is, chemically

Seedlac carries the full 5–6% natural wax content of unrefined shellac. The wax is not bonded to the resin — it sits in a self-assembled phase structure throughout the granule and the dried film. Solvent dewaxing removes it; the press-and-heat process of making button lac keeps it in place and pre-polymerizes the resin around it. Seedlac, by definition, has been through neither. It is the resin as the insect produced it, with the wax and natural color intact.

Dissolved seedlac is cloudy in the bottle. That cloudiness is the wax, and it is supposed to be there. Practitioners working with seedlac filter the cut through cheesecloth or paper cones before brushing or padding — the same way every classical shellac-finishing manual describes.

Who uses it

French polishers working in the older traditions — particularly those who prefer to control the cut, the filter, and the wax content themselves rather than buy a refined form that has decided for them.

Antique restorers and conservators — period work where the goal is to match an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century finish, and the question of what exact form of shellac the original used is open. Starting from the rawest form gives the finisher the same starting point the original maker would have had.

Small finishing shops and instrument repair benches that have done this long enough to have their own preferences about filtering, dissolving, and refining — for whom seedlac is the input they trust because they control what happens to it after.

Researchers and curious practitioners — finishers studying the material directly, trying to understand what the unrefined resin does before anything else has been done to it.

The varieties we carry

Three grades, spanning the tonal range from a light golden caramel through a deep red-amber:

Golden Kusmi Seedlac — the lightest. Warm neutral light caramel, leaning golden. The Kusmi grade is the higher-clarity seedlac that goes on to become Kusmi flake and Kusmi button lac. Excellent for older antique work where the wood's own color should come through warmly.

Bysakhi Dark Seedlac — rich brown, drawn from the Bysakhi harvest. A good choice for walnut, brown mahogany, and the darker antique work the lighter grades cannot reach without tinting.

Thai Seedlac — warm red-amber tones from a separate growing region. Good on rosewood, mahogany, cherry, and redwood. Also useful intermixed with the others to shift color toward the warm-red end of the range.

The Kusmi and Bysakhi grades come from the two harvest cycles of the Indian lac year. The Thai material is its own thing, with its own color register. Many practitioners keep more than one on the shelf and intermix to land on the tone a particular job calls for. If you would like a recommendation for a specific piece of work, an email or a phone call will get you a real answer from someone who knows the material.

Reference: the pound cut chart — dry weight per gallon, quart, and pint at the common working cuts. The same math applies whether the finisher dissolves seedlac, flake, or button.

Browse the grades below.