Every April through June, the forests of the Western Ghats go quietly productive. The kokum tree — Garcinia indica, evergreen, unremarkable-looking — drops its small, deep-purple fruits onto the forest floor. If you’ve had sol kadhi or a glass of kokum sherbet on a hot coastal afternoon, you already know this fruit, even if you didn’t know its name.
What most people don’t know is what happens after the rind is peeled away.
Inside each kokum fruit are eight to ten seeds. Those seeds hold roughly 40% fat by weight. Tribal women in communities across Uttara Kannada have known this for a long time. They wash the seeds, dry them on bamboo trays in the sun for four to five days, crush them, and slowly heat the crushed kernels until the fat melts out. Strained through cotton cloth and left to cool, it solidifies into kokum butter: pale yellow, faintly nutty, and almost odourless.
This is not a new discovery. It’s an old practice that never got the credit it deserved.
What Kokum Butter Actually Does
There’s a tendency in the skincare world to dress up ingredients in language that sounds impressive but doesn’t mean much. So here’s what kokum butter actually is, without the hype.
The butter is hard at room temperature due to its high stearic acid content. Stearic acid, a saturated fatty acid, gives kokum butter its firm, almost brittle texture. It’s also stable — the butter has a long shelf life and doesn’t go rancid quickly, which matters if you’re not buying from a brand with rapid turnover.
The oleic acid in it does something different: it softens. When kokum butter meets the warmth of your skin (it melts between 34–43°C), oleic acid allows it to glide and absorb without leaving a greasy residue. It doesn’t sit on top of the skin. It moves into it.
One more thing: kokum butter is non-comedogenic. It doesn’t clog pores. This is rarer than it sounds. Most heavy butters — such as shea and cocoa — are poor choices for oily or acne-prone skin. Kokum butter isn’t. It forms a thin, breathable film that helps the skin hold moisture without blocking sebaceous glands.
It also contains a small amount of tocopherols and plant sterols — compounds with antioxidant and skin-conditioning effects. They’re present in small amounts, but they’re there.
None of this is marketing language. It’s fatty acid chemistry, and it explains why kokum butter has been used for centuries on cracked skin, burns, and dry lips in communities that had no interest in trends, only in what worked.
The Region, the Crop, and the Gap
Sirsi is in the Uttara Kannada district of the central Western Ghats. This forest belt is one of the most biodiverse regions in Asia. Kokum grows here. So does Uppage (Garcinia gummi-gutta, also called Malabar tamarind), and soapnut (Sapindus trifoliatus), and dozens of other plants that forest-dependent communities have been collecting for generations.
The problem — and it’s a mundane, structural problem, not a romantic one — is that most of these non-timber forest products have no local market. They are collected, then go to waste, or are sold at prices that don’t reflect the labour involved. The people doing the collecting, often tribal women, bear the knowledge and the physical work. They rarely benefit proportionally.
Beeja Botanicals started in Sirsi in 2017 to address this directly. Veena, Nritya, and Mala — three friends, all rooted in the region in different ways — began by making lip balms from locally available ingredients. Kokum butter, uppage butter, and coconut oil account for over 75% of that lip balm, all sourced within 20 kilometres. The math of that geography is part of the point.
The idea was simple enough to say out loud: if these ingredients are already here, and the women who harvest them need fair income, and consumers need products that don’t come with a long, opaque supply chain, why isn’t someone connecting those things? Beeja is that connection.
A Brief Detour on Uppage
If kokum butter is quiet and precise, uppage butter is its more aromatic sibling. Extracted from the seeds of the Malabar tamarind tree, it has a smoky, nutty scent that makes it trickier to use in skincare. It also has slight comedogenic properties — meaning it can, for some people, clog pores — so it isn’t as well-suited for oily or acne-prone skin as kokum is.
But it’s a good emollient, and in Malenadu cooking, it has a history entirely separate from skincare — used in local sweets and traditional preparations. It’s a good example of how the same plant can carry completely different cultural meanings depending on who’s using it and why.
We work with both carefully, because both grow here and both represent the same principle: that what the forest offers is worth more than what the market typically pays for it.
Why This Actually Matters
There’s a version of this story that could be told as a feel-good narrative about nature and tradition. That’s not really the story.
The more honest version is that the beauty and personal care industry has spent decades developing products whose ingredient lists obscure where the ingredients actually come from and who produced them. The distance between consumer and source isn’t accidental. It’s structural, and it’s profitable.
Beeja Botanicals is a small operation in a small town. It isn’t going to dismantle that structure. But it is a proof of concept: that you can make a lip balm or a shampoo bar or a body butter with ingredients sourced from a 20-kilometre radius, pay the people who harvested them fairly, sell the product at a price that’s honest about what went into it, and still make something that works exceptionally well on your skin.
The products are packaged simply — in reusable or biodegradable packaging. There’s no elaborate fragrance to cover up the lack of active ingredients, because the active ingredients are just there, doing their job.
When you buy from us, you know exactly where the kokum butter came from. You know it was extracted from seeds collected by women in the forests of Uttara Kannada. You know the price reflects that.
That’s a different kind of skincare purchase. Not better because it sounds good — better because the chain of events that produced it is one you’d be comfortable with if you could see the whole thing.
The Seed
Beeja is a Kannada word. It means seed.
The founders chose it because most of what they work with comes from seeds — kokum, coconut, uppage — and because they’re trying to plant something else: the idea that self-care and community care don’t have to be in opposition. That what you put on your skin can also be an expression of what you think is worth sustaining.
It’s a modest claim, really. No single brand changes an industry. But ideas, like seeds, do sometimes grow into things larger than who planted them.
Beeja Botanicals is based in Sirsi. The forest is outside their window. The women who supply their raw materials live a few kilometres away. The products are on your bathroom shelf.
That’s the whole chain. And it’s short enough to actually see.
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