Young Phylica axillaris leaf-tips may be bright green and both shiny and hairy before they settle into the mature leaf life of hairless, dark green tops, woolly bottoms and stiff ascending and incurving tips. The leaf-tips are pointed but not sharply so.

Mature leaves are roughly of equal length (Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2015; Bond and Goldblatt, 1984; Gledhill, 1981; iNaturalist).