Shellac
What it does
Glazing agent.
How it's made
Resin from the lac insect.
Shellac is a natural resin used as a glazing agent to give a hard, shiny coating to sweets (it produces the glossy shell on many chocolate and sugar-coated confections), and to coat fruit and tablets. It is unusual among glazing agents in being a resin rather than a wax.
It is secreted by the tiny lac insect (Kerria lacca), which lives on certain trees in India and Thailand. The insects coat the twigs with a resinous secretion; these encrusted twigs (sticklac) are harvested, and the resin is scraped off, crushed, washed to remove insect and plant debris, and then purified by heating and filtering or by dissolving and refining.
The purified resin is formed into flakes and dissolved in food-grade alcohol to make the glaze applied to confectionery. Because it is insect-derived, shellac is not suitable for vegans (and is a consideration for some vegetarians), and it is used as a thin surface coating for gloss and protection.
Possible reactions
Not vegan; rare allergy.