JOHOR BARU: When it comes to beauty products, palm oil has traditionally occupied the lower rungs as an ingredient in soap.

It may yet move up the ladder a few rungs now with several cosmetic houses from South Korea and Japan showing interest in using a palm oil base for lipstick, foundation and day and night cream.

And one of palm oil’s latest selling points was that it was a plant based product, University of Malaya, Assoc Prof Dr Mohamed Ibrahim from Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine said.

“Plant-based pharmaceutical and beauty products are gaining popularity as consumers now prefer natural ingredients in them,’’ University of Malaya, Assoc Prof Dr Mohamed Ibrahim from Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine said.

He said a Japanese beauty house had recently approached him to express their strong interest to use palm oil in their products including lipstick, foundation and creams.

“I had provided them with the palm oil base and they managed to turn it into lipstick by adding natural colouring and beeswax,’’ he said.

He also said a well known Korean beauty company had already started marketing palm oil-based beauty products for the Korean market.

He said the company had started selling the Malaysian palm oil-based products in the country since 2013 and now uses about one tonne of palm oil base monthly for its products.

“Right now we are only producing the palm oil base solely for the company at the university.

“Hopefully we will have a manufacturing plant to expand our production capacity,’’ Dr Mohamed Ibrahim Noordin said on Thursday.

He said this when met at the opening of Commercialisation Wealth Creation through R&D seminar at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia by Second Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh.

Dr Mohamed Ibrahim said that the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation had allocated a RM1.5mil grant for him to conduct research on producing palm oil base for use in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

He said the emulsifying base under the brand name Hamim had met safety compliance requirements from the USA FDA and EU.

Source : The Star