Connection Thursday: where illipe butter comes from, and the forest it keeps standing
Some of the ingredients we love most do not begin in a lab or a factory. They begin in a forest, in the hands of families who have worked the same groves for generations. Illipe butter is one of them, and this Connection Thursday we want to tell you where it comes from.
A butter that starts in the rainforest
Illipe butter is pressed from the nut of the Shorea stenoptera tree, which grows wild in the rainforests of Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. The trees are not planted in tidy rows. They stand where they have always stood, and every few years they drop their nuts onto the forest floor. Local families gather what falls, dry it, and press it into a pale, solid butter that melts at skin temperature and helps restore the skin barrier.
Nothing about this is fast. The harvest follows the tree, not the calendar. That slowness is part of why the butter is so good, and part of why the forest stays standing.
The Forestwise partnership
We source illipe butter, along with kukui oil, through our partnership with Forestwise, a social enterprise working with communities in Kalimantan. The idea is simple, and it is the whole point of connection over consumption: a standing rainforest is worth more to a family than a cleared one.
When wild-harvested ingredients earn a fair income, the trees that produce them become an asset to protect rather than a plot to clear for palm or timber. Care for the forest and care for the people who live in it turn out to be the same act. This is what we mean when we say the forest protects us when we protect the forest.
Why we tell you this
You could use a body butter and never think about where it came from. We would rather you knew. Knowing that the illipe in your jar helped keep a grove of rainforest trees standing changes the object in your hands from a product into a small piece of a much larger relationship, between people, plants, and place.
This is the same thread that runs through the women of Munti Gunung in East Bali, another community we build alongside. Different island, same belief: business should nourish the people and the places it touches. If you want to feel wild-harvested illipe in daily ritual, you will find it at the heart of our richest treats, including the ones we compared in our body balm and body butter guide.
What you give, you get back. A forest kept whole gives back for generations. That is a trade we are glad to be part of.
