feel free to skip to the conclusion if you just want the best method
When I looked online for how to propagate my Pink Princess Philodendron I came across so many different resources with varying different methods on how to propagate. What I ended up deciding to do is compare the top three methods that I saw and try them all for myself in a proper scientific way. I ended up trying sealing with wax, searing on the stove and one for control as some people said to just drop it in the water. Many people seal the end of their propagations because the plant does not try to heal or grow out of where it was cut and will instead focus on pushing out new roots.
The experiment
So to propagate the plants I first got all of my cuttings with clean kitchen scissors making sure to keep good spacing between my nodes (for those who don't know the nodes are just below where the new leaves attach to the main stem where you should see little black bumps which is where new roots will grow out of). I then cleaned any excess sap with a clean paper towel and then followed with one of the methods that I was testing:
With two of the propagations I melted some candle was and dipped them in to seal the end.
Two others were seared by heating up a pan over high heat and then holding the newly cut end to the pan for ~10 seconds.
I also had one that was just a control that I did not attempt to seal in any way.
After cutting and sealing I then put them in separate vials filled with tap water with no special fertilizer.
Results
Left two are sealed with wax. Middle is control. Right two are seared.
Control (middle)
After around a month of waiting here are the results! As we can see the middle most propagation which was the control did by far the worst. We see minimal growth and this one did by far the worst.
Wax (left two)
The plants we sealed with wax did show some growth. However, even though it did show some growth I found that between the two that we had in this group there was some inconstant growth and overall seems to be hit or miss.
Searing (right two)
As we can see with the two on the right both showed considerable growth and were clearly the winners. This method showed the best and most consistent growth. I was super happy with this result as it seemed super obvious that this was the best method and even after this experiment they continued to outperform any other method I tried.
Conclusion
If you are planning on propagating your pink princess philodendron I would highly recommend searing the propagations before putting them in water. This method greatly outperformed any other method that I found and I have been doing this since this experiment and recommend to all my friends they do the same. In the future I would like to test this method on other plants and also to see what the best type of water to propagate plants in.