Is Lanolin Halal? Ruling on consuming foods and using products containing it

Question: Many food products use ‘Lanolin’ as an ingredient in them. Is Lanolin halal and consuming such food products halaal?

Answer: Praise be to Allah!

Lanolin is a fatty yellow substance that is extracted from sheep’s wool; it is also known as wool wax or wool grease. So is Lanolin halal in Islam? There is nothing wrong with consuming food that contains lanolin, if it is extracted from sheep’s wool.

If the sheep was slaughtered in the prescribed manner, then the matter is clear, because it is an animal that is regarded as pure and its flesh may be eaten, and it has been slaughtered in the prescribed manner. So there is no doubt that its hair (wool) and other parts are pure.

But if the wool was taken from it when it was alive, or it was not slaughtered in the correct, prescribed manner, then the more correct scholarly view is that the hair of all animals is regarded as pure, even if the animal was not slaughtered in the prescribed manner.

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah (may Allah have mercy on him) said: All hair, feathers and wool are pure, whether they are from an animal that may be eaten or the skin of an animal that may not be eaten, and whether they were taken from an animal that was alive or dead. This is the most likely to be correct of the scholarly opinions. [End quote from Majmoo‘ al-Fataawa (21/38)]

Even though there is a view that wool and hair are impure in general terms, if they are not taken from an animal that was slaughtered in the prescribed manner, this (lanolin) is a substance that is extracted from the wool, so it is no longer of the same nature as the impure hair from which it was taken; rather it has turned into a different substance, and has become – through this process of istihaalah (transformation) – pure and halaal.

Wallahualam (and Allah knows best).

More about Lanolin: Lanolin is refined wool grease which is a by-product of the wool-scouring industry. Three methods are in use for recovering wool grease from the raw wool. In the solvent extraction method the grease is leeched out by percolating a suitable solvent through the raw wool. The other two methods have this in common, that the wool is first scoured with soap and alkali. It is then treated in either of two ways: (1) it is passed through centrifuges producing the grease known as centrifugal grease, or (2) the scouring liquid is “acid- cracked.” The grease which is pressed and collected is known as degras. The solvent-extracted wool grease is dark in color, has a free fatty acid content of 7-11 per cent, and has a good physical body. Solvent wool grease is the purest form of crude material available. Very little solvent wool grease is used in the production of lanolin.

(Source: Malmstrom, Ivar (1949). “Technological aspects of lanolin”. Journal of Cosmetic Science. 1 (4). Archived from the original on 4 November 2021. Retrieved 4 November 2021.) Refer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanolin