Beeswax vs Cardboard Tips: Thermal Camera Test

We always felt it. We wanted to prove it.

How we tested it

We wanted to know whether the "cooler" difference people report with a Beeswax Tip is real and measurable, so we put it on a thermal camera. Three times.

Setup. Two hand-rolled papers, rolled by the same person with the same paper, the same fill, and the same tip length. One had a Beeswax Tip and one had a standard cardboard tip. Each tip had an identical plastic straw attached as a mouthpiece so nothing warm (like a face) was in the camera's view. Both rolls were passed through a board with the lit ends on the far side, out of frame. Both were lit together and used in turn, about 3 seconds at a time, through the straws. We recorded with a Seek Thermal Nano 300 and read temperatures at two points: the mouth end of each tip, and the straw a few inches past the tip. The straw is thin plastic, so it tracks the temperature of what's flowing through it.

Run 1. September 29. Beeswax tip on top, cardboard on the bottom. Cardboard lit first. Room at 80°F.
Run 2. September 29. Positions swapped, to rule out anything about the camera angle or slot.
Run 3. October 1, two days later. Beeswax on the bottom again. Beeswax lit first. Colder room, 73°F, and we let the camera run for nine minutes after use ended.

What we found

1. The mouth end of the Beeswax Tip runs cooler. Every run, every frame.

Across the three runs we measured 345 frames at the mouth end. The cardboard tip was hotter in 344 of them, by 10 to 21°F. It also heats up faster: in every run the cardboard tip was 15 to 30°F ahead within the first minute, while the Beeswax Tip climbed slowly.

2. What comes through the Beeswax Tip heats the straw less.

In Runs 1 and 2 the cardboard side was hotter downstream in every single frame, 272 out of 272, by 27 to 35°F. In Run 3 the cardboard side was hotter by about 15°F on average, but not in every frame. For the first 40 seconds the Beeswax Tip's straw actually read hotter. That's the one we lit first, and the same thing happened on the cardboard side in Run 1 when we lit that one first. After that, cardboard ran hotter the rest of the way.

3. The wax absorbs the heat and holds it.

After use we left both rolls in place and kept recording.

That's the mechanism on camera. The cardboard tip passes the heat along and cools off the moment use stops. The Beeswax Tip ran cooler the whole time and was the only warm thing left in the frame nine minutes later. The wax took the heat in and held it.

What we got wrong, and what we're fixing

We're publishing every run, including the parts that didn't go to plan.

Run 2: the cardboard-tipped cone canoed and the cherry reached the tip, which is why there's no cooldown comparison for that run.

Run 3: we pushed the Beeswax Tip further through the board than the cardboard tip, so most of it was sitting against the board instead of in open air, and its straw was angled downward instead of level. Both of those work against the beeswax side, and both are fixed for the next round, along with logging which roll gets lit first.

What this does and doesn't show

This was an in-house comparison against a cardboard tip, using surface temperatures read from a thermal camera. It shows that a Beeswax Tip runs cooler at the mouth end than a cardboard tip, that it helps cool what passes through compared to cardboard, and that the wax absorbs and holds heat. It doesn't measure anything about what passes through, and it isn't a health claim. It's about temperature.

Tested September 29 and October 1, 2026. Seek Thermal Nano 300, 320×240 sensor, room temperature 73 to 80°F.