Where the wax and butter come from
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Three ingredients, three different kinds of supplier, and one document that matters more than the material.
Three supply chains
Wax comes from beekeepers, from wax renderers or from cosmetic ingredient houses. The beekeeper route gives you a story and variable material; the ingredient house gives you consistency and a specification.
Butters come from a handful of processors through distributors, with refined and unrefined grades of each.
Oils come from pressers through distributors, and freshness is everything.
Cosmetic grade means documentation
The material in a craft-supply tin and the material in a cosmetic supplier's drum may be identical. What differs is what comes with it: a specification, a certificate of analysis, a lot number and a production date.
You are buying the paperwork, and you need it for safety substantiation and to answer a question about a batch two years from now.
Food-grade is not automatically cosmetic-grade and neither is automatically suitable for lip use, which is the stricter case because a small amount is ingested.
What to ask for
A specification sheet. A certificate of analysis for the lot. The production or pressing date, not the best-before. The INCI name, which is what goes on your label. Allergen information, particularly for anything nut-derived.
A supplier who cannot supply those is a supplier for experiments, not for product.
Buying the story
Local beeswax from a named apiary is a genuine differentiator in a category with almost none, and it is a fact rather than a claim, so it survives the cosmetic-or-drug line intact.
What it costs you is consistency. Wax from different hives and different seasons differs in color, smell and behavior, which means the formula has to be robust or the batch record has to be honest about what changed.