Why we love kokum butter (and think you should, too)

There's a good chance you've never heard of kokum butter. That's not because it's new, or scary, or a lab-created questionable ingredient. It's because the skincare industry has been too busy selling you water, shea + cocoa butter, and petroleum byproducts to talk about it.

Let's fix that, shall we?

What is kokum butter?

Kokum butter comes from the seeds of the Garcinia indica tree, which grows primarily on the west coast of India. It's been used in Ayurvedic medicine and traditional skincare for centuries, so it's actually not only not new but very old.

It's a plant-based fat that is hard and solid at room temperature, and it melts when it touches the skin. Because of these unique qualities, when it's combined into a spreadable balm (like these), it forms a very thin but protective layer over the skin. You can feel that it's there, but it's not greasy, and it's far more breathable than petroleum-based products, which means your skin can still do its thing underneath it. This gives the skin the best chance of healing itself (if that's what it needs) and keeping moisture in.

Kokum butter benefits for skin

Most moisturizers are mostly water. They feel good on the skin for about four minutes, evaporate, and you're back to square one. Cool, cool.

In contrast, petroleum-based products (your Vaselines, your Aquaphors) work by creating a heavy layer that traps moisture in. This is effective, but it's greasy, heavy, can trap baddies in + keep oxygen out, and (woof) it's derived from crude oil refining. The greasiness is often the biggest complaint. We dare you to apply vaseline and then touch...anything. It's not great.

Shea and cocoa butter are popular, and they're natural plant butters, which we love. But they still tend to feel heavy, transfer onto everything, and form a heavier, less breathable layer that traps the bads in and the goods out.

Kokum butter does something different.

It supports the skin barrier while maintaining a dry-touch finish. How, you say? The kokum butter layer over the skin is both very protective AND breathable. And because it's such a hard butter that you're effectively spreading very thin, you'll feel it on your skin without the greasiness. So it stays where you put it, it doesn't transfer onto your clothes, your phone, your car...

It's also non-comedogenic, which means it won't clog your pores. That means you can use it on your face without fear. (Though we always support patch testing, just to be sure!)

The technical reason, for the science nerds out there like us, is its fatty acid composition and unusually high melting point for a plant butter. The practical reason is that it just behaves differently on skin than anything else we've tried.

Why nobody's heard of it

If you're Big Skincare Company, you have shea butter, cocoa butter, petroleum jelly. Everyone has heard of these (educating people about a new ingredient is expensive!), and they are VERY inexpensive because they can be bought in such large volumes. There are futures markets for these (hello to the business nerds in the crowd!), which just means that companies can accurately predict their product costs.

And they work...well enough. Are they perfect? No. Are there armies of people out there whose skin problems aren't solved by these or anything else on the market? Or who just straight up don't use any products and deal with dry skin because they hate how the products feel? Yes, yes there are. And that's why we're here.

Why we're building around kokum butter

We didn't start with kokum butter because it was trendy (it's actually aggressively NOT trendy, at least as of this writing). We started with it because a woman at a farmer's market told us it was the only thing that had ever helped her son's skin. We went looking for products that used it and found nothing worth buying, so we made something.

Base Layer and Calm Balm are both built around kokum butter as the primary ingredient. Everything else in the formula is there to support it. No water, no petroleum, no filler. Just ingredients that earn their place, and nothing extra.

If you haven't tried it yet, give it a go. You might just be a kokum convert like us.