Beeswax vs Cardboard Tips: Thermal Camera Test

We always felt it. We wanted to prove it.

Since the beginning, people who use Beeswax Tips have told us the same thing we noticed ourselves: it feels cooler. It made sense. Beeswax has real mass and doesn't conduct heat well, so it should absorb heat from the warm air passing through it in a way a rolled piece of cardboard can't.

But "it makes sense" and "it feels cooler" aren't proof, and we weren't willing to put a claim on the box that we couldn't back up. So we bought a thermal camera and tested it against a standard cardboard tip, side by side, twice.

Here's exactly what we did and what we found.

How we tested it

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

Setup. Two identical hand-rolled papers with 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 were lit together, and air was passed through each one in turn, about 3 seconds at a time. 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 the air flowing through it.

Run 1. Beeswax tip on top, cardboard on the bottom.
Run 2. Positions swapped, to rule out anything about the camera angle or slot.

What we found

Across both runs, the cardboard side was hotter downstream in every single frame we measured: 272 out of 272. The gap was 27 to 35°F on the straw.

After the final round of airflow, the cardboard tip was back to room temperature in about four minutes. The beeswax tip was still noticeably warm seven minutes later. That's the mechanism on camera. The wax absorbed the heat and held it.

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 air passing through a Beeswax Tip came out measurably cooler than air passing through cardboard. It doesn't measure anything about what's in that air, and it isn't a health claim. It's about temperature.

Tested September 29, 2026. Seek Thermal Nano 300, 320×240 sensor, room temperature 80°F.

Want the full picture? Read Beeswax vs Cardboard Rolling Tips, or shop Beeswax Rolling Tips and slim Pinners.