Mango: the melting butter of the tropics

From the golden fruit's kernel comes a butter of rare creaminess. Extracted from the seed nestled in the heart of the mango, this fatty substance nourishes dry skin with a melting texture, less covering than shea butter but just as comforting — the gourmet sweetness of the tropics at the service of the skin.

• Mango butter is extracted from the kernel seed of the fruit (INCI: Mangifera Indica Seed Butter), not the sweet pulp.
• It melts at 30-35 °C, i.e., on contact with the skin: it becomes fluid under the fingers where shea butter remains firmer.
• Its profile is dominated by oleic acid and stearic acid (nearly 80% of fatty acids), which explain its nourishing richness and velvety feel.
• It is intended for dry to very dry skin, rough areas, chapped lips, and dry hair.

Mango is the fruit of the mango tree, Mangifera Indica, a large tropical tree of the Anacardiaceae family, cultivated from India — its historical cradle — to Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It is one of the most widely produced fruits in the world, appreciated for its juicy flesh and sunny flavor. But in cosmetics, it is not the sweet pulp that interests us: it is the almond hidden in the kernel.

Once the fruit is consumed, the kernel releases an almond rich in fatty substances. Pressed and filtered, this almond yields an ivory to pale yellow vegetable butter with a discreet scent. Nothing is lost: what was a fruit waste product becomes a precious ingredient, in a valorization logic that resonates with our work on prickly pear, from which the seeds are pressed to extract a rare oil.

Like any vegetable fat, its composition varies according to the mango variety, the country of harvest, and the pressing method. A crude, unrefined, cold-pressed butter retains its fatty acids and vitamins better than a deodorized butter.

Before being a butter, mango — mango in English — is first a fleshy, sunny fruit. Its juicy flesh is renowned for its high water content and nutritional qualities: the Ciqual composition table from ANSES (French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety) indicates raw mango contains around 83 g of water and 15 g of carbohydrates per 100 g, along with fiber and vitamin C. It also provides beta-carotene (provitamin A), the pigment that gives the flesh its orange hue. These values are averages: they vary according to the variety and ripeness of the fruit.

Among the nutritional benefits often cited for fresh fruit are its content of vitamins (vitamin C, provitamin A) and fiber, as well as its low energy density linked to its high water proportion. These qualities relate to food; for the skin, it is the butter from the kernel, not the pulp, that goes into our skincare products.

Depending on the producing regions — from India to Reunion Island — mango is enjoyed raw in pieces, sun-ripened, dried, blended into a fresh soup, or pressed into juice, sometimes paired with coconut. A spoon of ripe flesh is enough to flavor a fruit salad; savory recipes feature it in chutney. This gustatory generosity is found, transposed, in the melting quality of the butter: the same fruit nourishes the plate and the skin, each in its own way.

There isn't just one mango but hundreds of varieties — Kent, Keitt, Osteen, Amélie, or the famous Indian Alphonso — which differ in flavor, fiber content, and kernel size. This kernel, more or less large depending on the fruit, determines the butter yield: a large-kernel mango is a better choice for cosmetic production. It is one of the rare fruits where both the pulp, for food, and the kernel, for skincare, are valued.