How to Identify Ipe
Weight, extreme hardness, golden-to-olive-brown color, and yellow lapachol powder in the pores are the give-away Ipe cues.
Read the full Ipe encyclopedia entry →
The first thing that identifies Ipe is its sheer weight and hardness. Pick up a board and it feels startlingly heavy for its size — dry Ipe usually sinks in water. Try to dent it with a thumbnail or press a key edge into an offcut and it barely marks; at roughly 3,510 lbf Janka it resists indentation far more than oak, maple, or most other decking woods. That heft-plus-hardness combination alone rules out most common look-alikes.
Color and figure give the next set of cues. Heartwood runs golden brown to olive-brown, reddish-brown, or darker, often with subtle finer striping, and a narrow, sharply defined pale yellowish sapwood. A distinctive tell is a yellow-to-greenish powdery deposit (lapachol) that can be found lodged in the pores; wetting the surface or wiping it can reveal a yellow tint, and this is fairly specific to Ipe. Left outdoors and unfinished, the surface weathers to a silvery gray while the wood stays hard beneath.
Examine the end grain and texture. Ipe has a fine-to-medium, fairly even texture with straight-to-interlocked grain and small, closely spaced pores rather than the coarse ring of large pores you see in ring-porous oak or ash. The pores are often plugged with the yellow deposit. The interlocked grain can produce a subtle ribbon figure on quartered faces.
Smell and feel offer minor confirmation: Ipe has little strong odor when dry, and its surface machines to a hard, slightly waxy-smooth feel. The most common confusions are with other dense tropical decking woods sold under overlapping trade names — cumaru ("Brazilian teak"), massaranduba ("Brazilian redwood"), garapa, and jatoba ("Brazilian cherry"). Cumaru is usually browner and often has a faint vanilla/cinnamon scent Ipe lacks; jatoba is redder and less olive-toned; massaranduba is a deeper red-brown. When trade names are unreliable, fall back on the yellow lapachol powder, the extreme weight, and the color to steer toward Ipe.
Frequently asked questions
What's the quickest field test for Ipe?
Weight and hardness. Ipe is unusually heavy — dry boards tend to sink in water — and it strongly resists a thumbnail or key press. If a golden-to-brown board feels far heavier and harder than oak and shrugs off denting, Ipe is likely.
What is the yellow powder in the pores?
That's lapachol, a natural compound characteristic of Ipe. Finding a yellow-to-greenish powdery deposit in the pores, or a yellow tint when the surface is wetted, is a fairly specific clue that separates Ipe from many similar-colored tropical woods.
How do I tell Ipe from cumaru?
They're both very dense browns, but cumaru usually reads a warmer, more uniform brown and often gives off a faint vanilla-or-cinnamon scent when cut, which Ipe lacks. Ipe tends toward olive-brown and carries the yellow lapachol deposit in its pores.
Can I identify Ipe once it has weathered gray?
Yes — scratch or sand through the silvery surface layer. The gray is only skin-deep; beneath it the wood is still golden-to-olive brown, extremely hard, and heavy, and may show the yellow lapachol tint that confirms Ipe.
Ipe identified by the community
Recent Ipe samples identified with Wood Identifier.
