How does taking blubber from whales to make lipstick effect them?

Answer 1

No, and they never did.

There is a whale called a Sperm Whale. In the head of the whale is a cavity called the Tun, which holds a product called Sperm Oil. This doesn't actually contain any sperm, and no one's really sure why it's in there. Whalers of old would go out to catch sperm whales, behead them, throw the back part of the whale in the ocean where it was eaten by sharks, then bail the sperm oil out of the tun and process it to make spermaceti. Hermann Melville's Moby-Dick has a very good description of the steps necessary to catch a sperm whale and recover the spermaceti from it.

The resultant spermaceti is a wonderful product to make all sorts of cosmetic items. There are just two problems with it: you've got to kill a whale to get real spermaceti, and this particular whale has no qualms about turning around and eating the whalers or dragging them under the water where they drown. A LOT of people died in the sperm whale fishery.

(Blubber was rendered down into oil, which was used mostly for lighting.)

Spermaceti is such a good product our cosmetic chemists went to work on inventing a substitute, and they've got one. Synthetic spermaceti--which doesn't have to be called "synthetic" since you can't get the real stuff anymore--is made by esterification of jojoba oil with cetyl alcohol. (Cetyl alcohol is made from palm oil, and is also called palmytic oil.) People who have seen both confirm synthetic spermaceti to be every bit as good as the real thing--better, actually, since the only thing that dies is jojoba seeds.

Answer 2

The whale has to be killed to do this. It lowers their overall numbers of the species.