What is our Lanolin?

Our Lanolin is designed for its purity and fully certified.

Nature has designed wool grease for a variety of uses and with our unique knowledge of the supply chain and state of the art manufacturing process, our mission is to design the purest lanolin product possible.

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The Manufacturing Process

Sheep need to be shorn at least once a year as they do not shed their wool naturally. Wool holds in heat and we don’t want our sheep to get overheated in the summer. Their wool can get very heavy and dirty as well and we need to give them a hand to make them more comfortable.
Wool is a natural fibre and has many uses including for clothing and blankets as wool fibres are perfect to keep us warm. But before raw wool can be turned into our clothing, it needs to be washed, cleaned and processed into yarn and knitwear and fabric. 

Once the Wool Grease has been separated from the wool during washing, the refining process starts in which the Wool Grease gets cleaned and purified. This is now a substance called lanolin. It looks like a yellow waxy product which is solid at room temperature. 

In the pharmaceutical industry ‘lanolin’ is traditionally described as a water-in-oil (w/o) emulsion, with a water content of approximately 30% by weight.
Our product is refined into making our product waterless. This is called ‘Anhydrous Lanolin’. 

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What is Anhydrous Lanolin?

Anhydrous lanolin is a water-free wool wax and is a complex natural substance, designed by nature to protect and soften both skin and wool fibres. Chemically it is a wax, a complex mixture of long chain esters and fatty acids with high molecular weight alcohols. 90-95 % of lanolin are esters and 5 – 10 % are free alcohols with small quantities of free fatty acids and hydrocarbons. 
 
Our lanolin is specially selected, manufactured and refined to GMP and ISO 9001 Standards: it’s free from Nonylphenols Ethoxylates (NPEO´s) according to standard test DIN EN ISO 18218-1. 

 

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Applications

Lanolin is versatile and widely used in pharmaceutical, personal care and industrial products. Lanolin possesses a number of important chemical and physical similarities to human Stratum Corneum Lipids. Its strong emulsifying properties, making it an important ingredient in many creams, including breast creams, baby creams, lotions, ointments, plasters, shampoos, hair conditioners and other cosmetic products. Industrial applications include leather finishing, rust prevention, plasticisers, lubricants, adhesives and textiles. Pharmaceutical applications include Cholesterol and Vitamin D3.

 

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History

Wool Grease has been used beneficially over thousands of years, possibly finding its roots when sheep were first domesticated: 10,000 years ago.
One of the first mentions of wool grease was 3000 years ago, when Wool Grease was used in ancient Greece for waterproofing tents and garments. 
The Vikings, from the 8th to the 11th century, used Wool Grease to waterproof and rot-proof the wool sails on their ships, it was later used also by the Germans and Spanish for similar reasons.
In 1881 wool grease was refined and purified by Otto Braun and the German patented its name ‘Lanolin’ a year later. This patent described the recovery of Wool Grease from the scouring waters using a centrifuge. Lanolin was initially a trademark, but later became a generic name for the substance.

 

A lot has changed in the farming industry since the 1950’s and much has been done over the years for the well-being of sheep all around the world through the patronage of the governing body of world textiles IWTO (the International Wool Textile Organisation - please visit their website www.iwto.org.)

We are proud to be the only lanolin company in the world to be an associate member of the IWTO. 

 

The welfare and treatment of sheep worldwide is incredibly important to us as is the importance that that all of our products are produced without harming animals -  lanolin is derived from wool, shorn only from live sheep. 

We are fully committed to a supply chain that has the same ethical standards and values as we do. It is essential for us to emphasize clearly that with ethical treatment and welfare of all animals in the supply chain, the production of lanolin brings only positive aspects for humans and animals alike.