3. ResultsOne of the main purposes of applying wax coatings is to enhancegloss and attractiveness of the product. In the present study, itis clear that all the control uncoated citrus fruit – ‘Or’ and ‘Mor’mandarins, ‘Navel’ oranges and ‘Star Ruby’ grapefruit – had verylow gloss and would not be very attractive to buyers (Fig. 1). Incontrast, both the commercial polyethylene-based wax and theCMC/chitosan bilayer coating significantly enhanced fruit gloss andoverall visual appearance; it is noteworthy that, perhaps because oftheir rougher peel, the coated oranges were somewhat less glossythan the coated mandarins and grapefruit (Fig. 1).With regard to firmness and weight loss, it was found that boththe commercial wax and the CMC/chitosan bilayer coatings barelyaffected the firmness of mandarins, slightly increased the firmnessof ‘Star Ruby’ grapefruit, but significantly increased the firmness of‘Navel’ oranges (Fig. 2A). Regarding fruit weight loss, we obtainedvaried evaluation results: with ‘Or’ mandarins, both the commercialand the bilayer coatings slightly reduced weight loss rates from5.5% in control untreated fruit to just 4.6–4.7% (Fig. 2B); with ‘Mor’mandarins, weight loss of the commercial-wax-coated fruit did notdiffer from that of the controls, whereas the bilayer coating slightlyincreased weight loss from 3.8% in control fruit to 4.4% (Fig. 2B); inoranges and grapefruit, the commercial wax significantly reducedFig