Nowadays, in order to get high quality natural products, people have to do it on their own. That's really how Casa de Lorenzo Soaps came about, since we don't want to use detergents sold as soaps on our skin anymore, we made our own soaps (Read Why I Started Casa de Lorenzo). It was enjoyable, and one variant came after another. We're having so much fun in doing things on our own, we've decided since there's a shortage of supply of quality natural products here in the Philippines, we're going to make raw materials ourselves and one of our targets is making Passionfruit Seed Oil.
So we got interested Passionfruit. They come from the fruit of a creeping plant, more like a vine type of plant. Native to the Tropical Regions of North and South America, they're common in the areas of Southern Luzon but these can be found almost anywhere in the Philippines. On our recent trip to the Quezon part of Mt. Banahaw, we saw beside the pathways bushes of plants and among it are fruits of the Passionfruit.
We've recently acquired a few kilograms of Passionfruit Seeds for study, to make Passionfruit Seed Oil. Common in the Americas, it is also known as "Maracuja Oil." The Amazon locals call the oil "puro milagro" or "pure miracle" because of its amazing benefits to skin. In the next few days, we'll be extracting the oil from the seeds thru a manual expelling procedure.
Passionfruit seeds locally don't really come clean and dry. We got ours wet and surrounded by the sweet smelling pulp but its nothing that water can't wash away. The seeds were washed last night, and this morning, we dried them in the sun so it can be ready for extraction in the next few days.
Should we be successful in making the oil and would be selling Passionfruit Seed Oil, although it will be guaranteed cold-pressed, we really haven't decided yet if we'd have it refined. The problem with unprocessed oils is that the shelf life are very short, which is a dilemma if we're really going to be hardcore natural on this. Anyway, we'll just wing it and take it one step at a time. If we start selling Maracuja Oil or Passionfruit Seed Oil, that means we're pretty successful and made our choice.
