Psoriasis Reduction with Illipe Butter
The Dayak people of Borneo have been making a butter from Illipe nuts for countless centuries. It was traditionally used by them for healing and cosmetic purposes, especially to treat skin problems.
My Illipe butter comes to me directly from a Dayak village. It is a rich golden yellow in colour. It is not bleached or double refined. I am confident that no pesticides of fungicides come into contact with the trees. I mainly use it to make my soaps and lip balms from. I am very happy using it and I have never had any type of allergic reaction to it. It is the best moisturizer that I have ever used.
Illipe butter is an exotic butter derived from the nuts of the Shorea stenoptera tree, named by botanist Baron Von Mueller around 1771. It primarily grows in the jungles on the Malaysian side of Borneo. The trees can grow to 15 m in height. A mass flowering is followed by mass fruiting. The 5 cm long nuts are enclosed in a thin shell with wing-like attachments that help them fall clear of the mother tree. The Dayaks collect them from the forest floor. They are dried in the sun until the shells are brittle enough to be separated. They are pounded in rice mortar & pestle setups and the nuts break away from this shell so that they can be winnowed off. The nuts, which are about 50% fat, are then pressed to extract this nourishing emollient.
llipe butter is used to soften, moisturize, nourish and restore skin’s vitality and elasticity. Some say this is the most nourishing of all the butters. When it comes into contact with the skin, it melts. It is absorbed into the epidermis quite readily giving it a coating almost like an SPF.
The butter is creamy white. Unlike Shea Butter, it doesn’t leave a heavy waxy or oily residue on your hair or skin. Illipe possess a faint, sweet scent which is virtually undetectable when blended with other stronger smelling oils and butters. It also delivers the added fragrance of essential oils very well.
It contains oleic, palmitic, stearic and linoleic acid. It parallels cocoa butter and shea butter, but has a higher melting point & a brittle consistency. It can be used in all manner of facial skin care products. It is ideal for use in bar soaps, lip balms, lip sticks, lotion bars and other stick type applications where a higher melting point is desired in order for it to hold its shape. It can also be used in ointments.