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Ok, so current project is "late Heresy" Emp Children, so descended to chaos but not utterly corrupted yet.

Largely achieving this by using standard Marine as well as CSM kits and bashing, together with some FW Legion stuff.

Consequently, some pieces are modelled with Purity Seals which aren't easy to remove, at least without leaving a flat spot behind which I don't have time to sculpt over on an army scale project.

I'm toying with the idea of using bright or pastel colours for the wax part, but I'm interested to see if anyone has any other suggestions?

I usually just leave that kind of stuff on my Corrupted Marines (pet project) if I absolutely must use a piece that has Imperial iconography on it. I guess it would also really depend on your color scheme. I use metallic for armor, so its hella forgiving.

I paint them old and tattered looking, like they haven't been maintained but have been deliberately kept to show off their heresy.

Paint the parchment to look like flesh. And either fill in the wax with gs and paint them silver and pretend they are bonding studs or big arse nails. Or paint them a nice contrasting colour and then whenever someone quizzes you on it you can just jam your fingers in your ears and go lalalala.

I can totally see some traitor marines deliberately keeping their old purity seals out of spite, or creating their own mocking 'impurity seals'. Either could be done just with paint, or perhaps deface the seal with e.g. a tiny chaos star (four careful cuts with a sharp scalpel to create an 8-pointed chaos star) or greenstuff your own tiny seal to put over top of the original.

It certainly isn't easy to sculpt details that small lol, but I think the idea that Snrub has is the best - make it look like something else with a little GS work. Maybe even press mold a few skulls from a vehicle kit, trim down the wax seal top, and glue the gs skull on. But some sort of stud works well. Especially if you are doing Word Bearers, but I wouldn't put it past Emperor's Children doing it either. I'm not sure if they would have kept their oaths after their fall, even if in spite. They would certainly mock it with a similar type of oath dedicated to their new master(s).