Disregard everything you read there. Whoever wrote that is totally clueless. This question comes up every week or 2. Paraffin has several meanings. Chemically it means without affinity, meaning unreactive, and is applied to the alkanes which are a wide range of similar compounds differing only in the number of carbons. They start with methane in natural gas, having 1 carbon and range up to the thousands of carbons in polyethylene. Another meaning is the wax a certain range of molecular weights form. It is more the English that use it for certain liquids used as fuel. Between the wax and the liquid fuel is a range that has good lubricating qualities and is very chemically stable short of a flame. In the early days, such liquids could easily be distilled from the crude oil found in Pennsylvania. Depending on the care with distillation some of the wax would be present too. A far bigger problem then was the unsaturated material that when exposed to heat, oxygen, and moisture would polymerize into sludge.
Today much of the crude oil is asphaltic based. It is much harder to obtain good base stock from such crudes, however modern refining methods can deliver high quality base stocks one way or another. So a base stock that is a paraffin, can have very little material that should have gone into candles. Its viscosity does go down as the temperature goes up, and more so than most other materials. Modern oils contain pour point depressants and viscosity index improvers. The VI improvers tend to be less shear stable and do wear out leading to thinning out of grade. The synthetic oils requires less additives, but still eventually become depleted and contaminated enough to require replacing.
Chemically, the PAO's are alkanes and could be referred to as paraffins. So condemning an oil for containing paraffins is nonsense. All the quality dinos and all but the pure ester based synthetics contain them.
If any oil is allowed to use this it should be on the label.
