Connection Thursday: pijat bayi, and the oldest ritual we know
Across Indonesia, many babies meet the world through warm hands and a little oil. The practice is called pijat bayi, baby massage, and for generations it was carried by the dukun bayi, the traditional birth attendant who visited a new mother in the weeks after birth. She would warm oil in her palms and move slowly over the baby’s legs, belly, back, and arms while the mother watched, and later, while the mother did it herself.
Most Connection Thursdays we write about the people behind our ingredients. Today the connection is older than any of them: touch, handed down from one pair of hands to the next.
Knowledge that lives in the hands
Nobody learned pijat bayi from a manual. Indonesian midwifery researchers describe it as hereditary knowledge, learned by watching and doing rather than through formal training. A grandmother shows a daughter. The daughter, a few years later, shows a sister or a neighbour. Today many Indonesian midwives teach parents to give the massage themselves, so the knowledge keeps moving, now with a little more science attached.
The oil was usually whatever the household already trusted. In much of the archipelago, that meant coconut. One Indonesian study compared mothers massaging their babies with virgin coconut oil against mineral oil, 15 minutes twice a day for four weeks, and found slightly faster weight gain in the coconut group. It is one small study, not a promise, but it echoes what grandmothers assumed all along.
The honest part
Newborn skin is still learning to be a barrier. A 2016 UK trial with 115 healthy full-term babies found that olive and sunflower oil, used twice daily, hydrated the skin but slowed the development of its protective lipid structure compared with no oil at all. The researchers urged caution with oils on very young skin.
So if you want to bring this ritual home, we would ask you to keep it gentle and plain:
- Talk to your midwife or doctor first, especially in the first weeks or if eczema runs in the family.
- Choose a single, unscented oil. No essential oils on babies, and that includes our blends.
- Try a small patch on the leg first and wait a day.
- Keep the room warm, the pressure light, and stop whenever your baby turns away.
For more on gentle routines for little ones, our guide to natural baby skin care is a good place to start.
The takeaway
Pijat bayi was never really about the oil. It was about a few quiet minutes where a new parent and a new person learn each other’s rhythm, with someone older close by to say, slow down, like this. The same is true of adult rituals, as we wrote in our piece on Balinese massage oil. If you would like a plain, single-ingredient oil for your own hands, our Virgin Coconut Oil is cold-pressed and pure, with nothing added. And if someone once taught you a ritual like this, perhaps this is the week to pass it on.
